Winners and losers of early elections: On the welfare implications of political blockades and early elections

We provide a welfare analysis of early elections in a dynamic model of political competition with endogenous political blockades. Blockades arise if a party wins an election due to the support of voters with extreme policy preferences. We show that flexible election timing has the advantage that political blockades are overcome and political decisions are taken more frequently, but also the disadvantage that these decisions are of a lower quality. We argue that the disadvantage of early elections is likely to dominate, but that time-consistency problems make a constitutional ban on early elections difficult to maintain in a parliamentary democracy.