This paper explores the conditions under which authoritarian government manipulates election timing. Previous work has focused on determinants of election timing in parliamentary democracies, assuming that governments under presidential systems are not institutionally allowed to manipulate election calendar. Interestingly, experiences in autocracies strongly suggest that authoritarian leaders often go beyond the institutional rule and arbitrarily decide even the timing of presidential elections. Moreover, governments in autocracies usually have the richer “menu of manipulation” than those in democracies. Yet, little work has done thus far on the relationship between election timing and other types of electoral manipulation such as blatant election fraud and vote buying. Using a newly collected dataset on election schedule covering all autocratic regimes after WWII, we theoretically and empirically access the determinants of election timing in dictatorships. Our extensive dataset first reveals that autocracies are more likely to call the presidential elections earlier or later than scheduled. In addition, presidential elections in autocracies tend to be exposed to frequent manipulation compared to parliamentary elections in autocracies, suggesting that presidential elections are the main venue of election timing manipulation in dictatorships. Theorizing on the different costs and benefits that an autocrat receives when resorting to each type of electoral manipulation, we then go on to propose a first cross-national test of the determinants of election timing in autocracies, while focusing on correlates of election timing, blatant election fraud, and the maneuvering of fiscal policy.
