The electoral cycle in political contributions: the incumbency advantage of early elections
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The electoral cycle in political contributions: the incumbency advantage of early elections Lasse Aaskoven1
© Springer Nature Limited 2019
Abstract The occurrence of early elections varies significantly between and within electoral democracies. Previous studies have investigated the determinants and the electoral consequences of early elections. However, whether early elections affect financial contributions to political parties has not been independently studied. This article argues that incumbent government parties gain a relative advantage compared to non-government parties with regard to private contributions in years of early elections. This argument is tested using party-level data from Denmark. Taking partyfixed effects into account, the results show a strong incumbency advantage in private contributions for early elections. The findings suggest that the ability to call early elections gives incumbent parties an additional advantage besides being able to call elections when economic conditions and opinion polls are favorable. Keywords Elections · Election timing · Incumbency advantage · Political parties · Party finance
Introduction Do early elections–elections held before the end of the electoral term—provide an advantage to incumbent government parties with regard to party funding? The extent to which incumbent governments are able to call elections early, and whether governments actually exercise this power, vary significantly between democratic countries and within these countries over time. While early elections have been common in the Dutch and Danish political systems and were a key feature of the
* Lasse Aaskoven [email protected] 1
Department of Government, University of Essex, Colchester, UK Vol.:(0123456789)
L. Aaskoven
British political system1 before the enactment of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act in 2011, all Norwegian election since WWII were held in the year, they was officially scheduled. In the intermediate case of Sweden only two parliamentary elections in the post-war period were held in non-scheduled years. But what are the political consequences of these early elections and does the ability to call these elections alter the balance of power between government and opposition parties? In recent decades, the political science literature on elections has paid closer attention to the issue of whether elections are held as scheduled or called early by incumbent governments. Most of the political science and political economy literature on early election calling has relied on the framework of political business cycles where, starting with Nordhaus (1975), the argument is that an incumbent government will try to manipulate the economy before elections in order to maximize voter support, which gives rise to electoral cycles in public policies, see Alesina et al. (1997) for a seminal study of these phenomena. Using the same logic, early studies from Japan (Ito 1990) suggested that an incumbent which are able to call early elections, and thus to determine the time of the ele
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