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Constitutional Political Economy
Published in:

02-02-2017 | Original Paper

Fixed versus flexible election terms: explaining innovation in the timing of Canada’s election cycle

Authors: J. Stephen Ferris, Derek E. H. Olmstead

Published in: Constitutional Political Economy | Issue 2/2017

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Abstract

This paper argues that there is an efficiency gain underlying the recent adoption of legislation calling for a fixed 4-year governing term by the federal and most provincial governments in Canada. The efficiency gain arises from foreclosing an externality produced by the Canadian constitutional provision that sets a maximum length for a legislative term (5 years) while allowing the governing party (through the Governor General) to dissolve the House early. Because the opportunistic use of surprise can improve the governing party’s probability of winning, strategic choice can lead to elections being held at times that most disadvantage the incumbent’s rivals. Evidence from Canada is introduced suggesting that federal elections became less predictable through successive reductions in the campaign time given to competitors, thus raising the cost of this externality. The same reasoning suggests that the party most likely to propose this legislative innovation will be the party in opposition rather than in power and/or the new leader of an established party facing loss in the upcoming election. By fulfilling the fixed term even when it could benefit by calling the election early, the party establishes a precedent that raises the political cost to others of cancelling the fixed term legislation.
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Appendix
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Footnotes
1
Other countries that have adopted fixed terms recently include South Africa (1996), New Zealand (1986, 1993), Scotland (1998), Ireland (1992) and the United Kingdom (2011).
 
2
All jurisdictions in Canada have picked a recurring four-year election cycle, with most dated to take place sometime in the fall. The exceptions are British Columbia with a fixed date set in May while Alberta has a 3 month window between March 1 and May 31. See the Data Appendix for greater political detail.
 
3
Provincial legislation is often more explicit. For example, Sect. 23 of British Columbia’s Constitution Act reads: (1) The Lieutenant Governor may, by proclamation in Her Majesty's name, prorogue or dissolve the Legislative Assembly when the Lieutenant Governor sees fit. (2) Subject to subsection (1), a general voting day must occur on May 17, 2005 and thereafter on the second Tuesday in May in the fourth calendar year following the general voting day for the most recently held general election.
 
4
Because the minority Conservative Party that formed the government passing this bill chose twice to dissolve the House before the end of the designated four-year term, it is currently unclear whether or not the Act has effectively fixed governing durations. However in its third term the Conservative Party did establish a precedent for majority federal governments, upholding the scheduled four year term despite encountering economic turbulence that might otherwise have led to an early election call. Whether the current majority Liberal government chooses to retain that legislation or enact its own preferred preferential voting legislation remains to be seen. See also Tremblay (2008/2009) and Stoltz (2010).
 
5
While a number of provincial governing parties have called elections earlier than the projected fixed election date, none have continued governing past the set date (that is shorter than the constitutional limit of 5 years).
 
6
It is because the political party that proposes the adoption of a fixed term will lose a real opportunistic advantage over its rivals that that the slow shift to fixed electoral terms across Canadian jurisdictions cannot be considered as one of simply ratifying the ongoing trend to new political norm. Without there arising some offsetting gain, future governing parties would reverse the decision and benefit from the advantage discretion provides.
 
7
It is interesting to note that Sweden changed its Riksdag term from three to four years in 1994 and New Zealand, which has a fixed maximum term of three rather than the more usual 4 years, has recently attempted to extend the term limit back to 4 years. See The Dominion Post C8 March 2 2013. For a discussion of the term length debate in Australia, see http://​www.​australiancollab​oration.​com.​au/​pdf/​Democracy/​Electoral-terms.​pdf.
 
8
While parliamentary governments with discretion can also be expected to use policy to influence election outcomes, policies must be timed to target “expected” election dates that are often revised to take advantage of unanticipated circumstances. Given that monetary policy, for example, takes up to two years before generating its expected effect, this makes the effective use of policy for electoral advantage less reliable (Ferris and Voia 2011).
 
9
Note that a constitutional maximum prevents the governing party from being able to avoid unexpected bad events at the end by surfing beyond the term limit. Hence discretion here allows only one-sided re-adjustment, an asymmetry that prevents the average governing duration from rising to meet the permitted governing interval.
 
10
This is not inconsistent with the co-presence of some social advantage. For example, election timing may be used to signal competency which would provide useful information to the electorate. See for example Rogoff and Sibert (1988) and Smith (1996).
 
11
To use an Alchianism, haste need not make waste, haste makes for higher cost.
 
12
Note that the existence of an externality need not mean that the externality should be corrected--the externality becomes a meaningful social cost only when the cost of correcting it becomes lower than the problem itself.
 
13
Robert Ghiz, the Premier who introduced fixed term legislation in Prince Edward Island (PEI) in 2008 is quoted as seeing its introduction as his biggest mistake once he was in power. See the Wayne Thibodeau interview in The Guardian, December 19, 2014.
 
14
New Brunswick (4.0) and Saskatchewan (4.08) form the two exceptions, with most provinces in the range of 3.6–3.7 years between elections. Newfoundland and Labrador (Nfld) is the outlier on the low side, with elections held on average every 3.4 years. See the Data Appendix for more detail.
 
15
Roy and Alcantara (2013) consider and reject the possibility of a connection between changes in campaigning financing rules and the adoption of fixed terms.
 
16
Only six of Canada’s forty two post Confederation federal governments lasted as long as 4.8 years and two of these were during the two world wars, 1917 and 1940 (Elections Canada, Appendix 3).
 
17
The outliers are Manitoba and Ontario with 8 and 6 minority governments prior to fixed term legislation.
 
18
It has been argued that the 4-year term may have been chosen precisely because it most closely mimics current practice. As Professor Blackburn is quoted as arguing, ‘The proposal for fixed term Parliament as a whole should fit as closely as possible into existing constitutional expectations, and the idea that four years is about the right length of time between elections is very prevalent’ (Hazell 2010, p. 14).
 
19
There is some suggestion at the federal level that governing durations have fallen through time. For example, regressing federal durations across consecutive parliaments (p_number = 1…39 from 1867 to 2008) while controlling for minority government status, partisanship (using the more liberal of the two major party types) and the percentage of seats won by the governing party, we find
$${\rm{Governing}}\;{\rm{duration}}\, = \,2.49\,(2.68) - 0.016\;{\rm{p}}\_{\rm{number}}\,(1.77) - 1.92\,{\rm{Minority}}\,(4.62) + 0.356\,{\rm{Liberal}}\,(1.15) + 0.029\,{\rm{Seats}}\,(2.20)$$
with Adj R2 = .627 and D.W. = 2.4 and where duration is measured in years. The absolute value of the t statistic is included in brackets following the OLS coefficient estimate. Here the time effect is significantly different from zero only at the ten percent significance level. There is no evidence of a similar time effect arising for the provinces. See Data Appendix for descriptive statistics and sources.
 
20
BC was the first jurisdiction in Canada to establish a fixed four year term, while BC, Ontario and Quebec together incorporate seventy five percent of Canada’s population.
 
21
The Canada Elections Act imposes a limit on all election expenses during the election period ‘to facilitate a level playing field among candidates’. Prime Ministers have traditionally imposed the minimum period both to constrain the time available to rivals and to constrain rival expenditures (since increasing the election beyond the current 36 day minimum increases the daily amount that can be spent by rivals by 1/37 of the limit set for the minimum).
 
22
BC and Quebec campaign lengths remained constant at 28 and 34 days respectively, while Ontario’s stayed at 30 except for the early election call of the Wynne government in 2014. The main exception to constancy is in the federal government where the first campaign period that followed the first 4 year majority government rose dramatically from 37 to 78 days.
 
23
Aggregate data on bills initiated and passed are readily available only for the Parliament of Canada and only from the second session of the 11th Parliament onward (November 1909). See the website listed in references. Note that while bills can be introduced and passed separately by both the House of Commons and the Senate, a bill must be passed by both before proceeding to receive royal ascent from the Governor General.
 
24
The sharp troughs in the diagram correspond to parliaments with minority governments. Despite the appearance, the addition of minority status to the regressions presented below adds no explanatory power. This implies that the effect of minority status on bill passage arises primarily because of its shorter length.
 
25
As emphasized by one of our referees, it is important to note that the regressions do not control for any change in the content of each piece of legislation. This might be an important consideration, given the Harper government’s (39th to 41st Parliaments) highly publicised use of large omnibus budget bills to guarantee passage of a bundle of traditionally separate, but controversial, bills. However, in discussing the growing used of omnibus bills in Canada, Professor Dodek (2016, p. 19) quotes Aaron Wherry (who has studied the issue of omnibus budget implementation bills closely, [that] “there were 12 budget bills tabled between 1994 and 2005, averaging 73.6 pages; between 2006 and 2011, 11 budget bills were tabled, averaging 308.9 pages” (see Aaron Wherry, “A Short History of Budget Implementation Acts”, Maclean’s 4 May 2012, online: www.​macleans.​ca). That is, the recent rise in the use of omnibus bills followed rather than preceded the proposed adoption of fixed terms in 2006.
 
26
Where ratio equals the ratio of bills passed to bills introduced
$${\rm{Ratio}} = 0.305\,(1.92) - 0.012\,{\rm{Trend}}\,(2.90) + 0.055\,{\rm{Duration}}\,(4.15) + 0.530\,Ratio( - 1)\,(4.34)\,{\rm{where}}\,{\rm{Adj}}\,{{\rm{R}}^2} = .875\,{\rm{and}}\,{\rm{DW}} = 2.12.$$
The absolute value of the t statistic is in brackets following the OLS coefficient estimates. See the Data Appendix for descriptive statistics and sources.
 
27
Note, however, that when comparing tenure/incumbency across alternative fixed length U.S. elected offices, Glazer and Grofman (1987) have shown that re-election probabilities are higher in shorter term offices so that U.S. “House and Senate members have had careers of virtually equal length” (p. 555).
 
28
The incumbency success rate is typically higher in the Canadian provinces: Quebec at 61%, 63% for BC, 70% for Manitoba, and 75 and 83%, respectively, for Ontario and Alberta. BC’s number is calculated from the 10th election onwards and excludes two war year coalition governments and Manitoba from the 4th election onwards. For more detail see the summary table in the Data Appendix.
 
30
The period leading into the adoption of fixed election dating in Canada (the late 1990s and early 2000s) coincides with the period of stable economic growth leading into the 2007/8 financial crisis and following recession. That period of stability—the Great Moderation—was often attributed to better informed policy and more effective control over the economy. To the extent that incumbent governing parties believed that control over the economy by means of fiscal and monetary policy was increasingly effective, the case for a fixed term would rise relative to discretion.
 
31
The current Trudeau Liberal government finds itself in just such a position, having proposed dropping the first-past-the-post electoral system for proportional representation when in opposition and now having to deal with its revised evaluation of the two systems once in power.
 
32
See Roy and Alcantara (2013) for an alternative complementary way of explaining the timing of the adoption of fixed terms across Canada.
 
33
Pauline Marois’ minority government lost the next election following its call much earlier than its fixed next date.
 
34
Here it could be argued that effective opposition was internal and that Alison Redford’s adoption of fixed terms (among other reforms) was part of a strategy for a newcomer to overcome the incumbency advantage of the old guard in the PC party in Alberta.
 
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Metadata
Title
Fixed versus flexible election terms: explaining innovation in the timing of Canada’s election cycle
Authors
J. Stephen Ferris
Derek E. H. Olmstead
Publication date
02-02-2017
Publisher
Springer US
Published in
Constitutional Political Economy / Issue 2/2017
Print ISSN: 1043-4062
Electronic ISSN: 1572-9966
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-017-9237-y

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