The Heterogeneity of Early Elections

Early elections can either be used by the prime minister’s party to consolidate its position or they can be directed against that party when its hold on power slips. These two types of elections occur under different conditions. The literatures on government terminations and the political economy of election timing only partially accommodate that heterogeneity: Neither provides a fully developed account of the conditions that enable the two types of elections and both tend to treat early elections as a single homogeneous outcome in empirical work. This chapter addresses these shortcomings. We characterize the difference between the two classes of elections, offer the first account of the constitutional, economic and political circumstances that make each type more likely, and test it using a dataset of 327 East and West European elections. Our results reveal that the two early election types have different predictors and make clear that premature polls cannot be analysed as a single outcome.