The Element of Surprise: Election Timing and Opposition Preparedness

• Author: Charles T. McClean
• DOI: 10.1177/0010414021997172
• Published date: 01 September 2021
• Date: 01 September 2021
• Subject Matter: Articles

2021, Vol. 54(11) 1984 –2018

https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414021997172

Comparative Political Studies

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DOI: 10.1177/0010414021997172

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Article

The Element of Surprise:

Election Timing and

Opposition Preparedness

Charles T. McClean1

Abstract

How can incumbent governments benefit when they control the timing of

elections? The conventional wisdom is that incumbents gain an advantage

by timing elections to coincide with favorable economic conditions. An

alternative mechanism that has received less attention is the element of

surprise: the incumbent’s ability to exploit the opposition’s lack of election

preparedness. I theorize and empirically test this surprise mechanism using

candidate-level data from Japanese House of Representatives elections

(1955–2017). The results show that in surprise elections, opposition parties

recruit fewer, lower-quality candidates, spend less money campaigning,

coordinate their candidates less effectively, and ultimately receive fewer

votes and seats. Evidence from fixed effects models and exogenously

timed by-elections further suggest that surprise matters more in shorter,

competitive election campaigns and helps incumbents more with confronting

inter-party as opposed to intra-party electoral competition. These findings

add to our understanding of how strategic election timing can undermine

electoral accountability.

Keywords

cabinets, elections, public opinion, and voting behavior, Japan, legislative

studies, presidents and executive politics

1Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Charles T. McClean, Program on U.S.-Japan Relations, Weatherhead Center for International

Affairs, Harvard University, 61 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.

Email: cmcclean@wcfia.harvard.edu

997172

CPSXXX10.1177/0010414021997172Comparative Political StudiesMcClean

research-article

2021

McClean 1985

2 Comparative Political Studies 00(0)

In most parliamentary systems, the incumbent government can choose when

it wants to hold elections. This feature of parliamentary democracy has led to

much debate about the extent to which incumbents can strategically time

elections to their benefit. In cases when incumbents do benefit, the mecha-

nism is nearly always thought to be economic opportunism. By timing elec-

tions to coincide with peaks in the economy, incumbents can signal

competence to voters and boost their reelection prospects (Alesina et al.,

1993; Chowdhury, 1993; Inoguchi, 1979; Ito & Park, 1988; Kayser, 2005;

Roy & Alcantara, 2012). Yet, not all studies find that incumbents benefit from

economic opportunism (Smith, 2004), while others suggest that incumbents

can benefit from strategic timing even independent of economic conditions

(Schleiter & Tavits, 2016). More broadly, there are good reasons to believe

that control over timing can provide a much wider set of strategic options for

incumbent governments than taking advantage of economic conditions.

One alternative mechanism that has received less attention is the element

of surprise. Apart from projecting strength in handling the economy, incum-

bents can also use their control over election timing to exploit the weakness

of the opposition by catching them off guard and unprepared for an election.

Compared to fixed-term elections, opposition parties in many parliamentary

systems with flexible terms are given little advance notice of the election

date—sometimes as little as 1 month, as is common in Japan. This informa-

tion asymmetry creates a distinct disadvantage for opposition parties, who

already must make up for the inherent disadvantages they face relative to

incumbents. Without firm knowledge of when the next election will be held,

it is difficult for opposition parties to know how best to allocate their scarce

resources between different activities such as legislating and electioneering,

which candidates to support, or which other parties to coordinate with and

form electoral coalitions.

Elections offer voters a means to hold representatives accountable, and

thus it is important to know whether incumbent governments can gain an

unfair advantage by surprising the opposition with an early election. If

incumbents can manipulate expectations about election timing to extend their

own survival in office, then perhaps electoral accountability is not working as

it should. The issue has received significant debate in countries such as the

United Kingdom and Canada, and members of parliament in both countries

recently passed legislation to limit the executive’s control over election tim-

ing in favor of fixed terms.1

In Japan, however, the incumbent government continues to wield the

power to call an election whenever they feel the timing is right. For almost

the entire postwar period, this power has belonged to members of the Liberal

Democratic Party (LDP), who ruled nearly uninterrupted for over 50 years

1986 Comparative Political Studies 54(11)

McClean 3

from 1955 to 2009, and then returned to power in 2012.2 To what extent does

the power over election timing help to explain the LDP’s long-term domi-

nance in Japan?

The results in this article, which draw on candidate-level election data

from Japan’s House of Representatives (HOR) from 1955 to 2017, reveal

that the LDP gains a significant advantage in elections that are more sur-

prising for the opposition. These elections lead to a vote share bonus for the

LDP of about 4 percentage points in the average HOR district compared to

more expected elections, even when controlling for economic conditions.

The results further indicate that opposition preparedness is a key mecha-

nism. When caught by surprise, opposition parties recruit fewer, lower-

quality candidates, spend less money in their campaigns, and lose out on

seats that they should have been able to win by coordinating inefficiently

with other parties.

To delve more deeply into the effects of surprise elections on incumbent

and opposition performance, I adopt two identification strategies that have

not previously been used in the election timing literature.3 The first

approach analyzes whether surprise elections can have a differential effect

across districts depending on institutional and contextual factors. Focusing

on characteristics that vary within the same election allows me to include

two-way fixed effects to help account for other invariant characteristics

across districts or in given years that could affect LDP performance and

opposition coordination. By leveraging this variation as well as legal

changes over time, I provide evidence that surprise is most effective in

shorter, competitive election campaigns. I also find that surprise elections

are more useful for LDP prime ministers and their cabinets in confronting

inter-party electoral competition as opposed to challenges from intra-party

rivals within the highly factionalized LDP.

The second identification approach explores whether the LDP and opposi-

tion parties differ in their capacity to respond to surprise elections. Measuring

differential capabilities across parties, however, is complicated by the fact

that the act of calling a surprise election is asymmetric—with LDP govern-

ments choosing to dissolve parliament and opposition parties forced to

react—and endogenous to LDP expectations about opposition performance

in the election. To help address these concerns, I exploit a feature of Japanese

electoral law wherein the timing of a by-election is exogenously determined

when a seat becomes available midterm. I then look at parliamentarians who

pass away while in office, arguing that this provides random variation in the

districts that receive an early election—an election that importantly comes as

a surprise to both the LDP and opposition parties. By comparing districts

where the legislator passes away with other similar districts, I find further