November 20, 2019
Masaaki Higashijima (Tohoku University)
Previous work has focused on election timing in parliamentary democracies, assuming that governments are unable to manipulate election calendar of presidential elections. However, experiences in autocracies strongly suggest that autocrats arbitrarily decide the timing of both presidential and legislative elections. Building upon the literature of autocratic elections, we explore the determinants of election timing in autocracies. We argue that dictators strategically decide election timing by considering costs and benefits of holding elections. Specifically, we suggest that when elections enable dictators to effectively demonstrate his strengths through electoral mobilization they have incentives to call early elections. Our data analysis is consistent with the theoretical expectation, finding that early elections are more likely (1) when dictators suffer low economic performance and thus need to preempt internal threats by signaling their strengths, (2) in executive elections wherein dictators can feature themselves through election campaigning, and (3) in elections without opposition where dictators hardly face the risk of revealing their weaknesses through election results.