Dear Markus and Olli, Markus wrote (in response to me): > > If people have come to expect an > > election a year, then it won't really matter if an early election > > doesn't give the legislature another full term, since no one expects > > that it would last that long anyway. > > Even in Italy the parliament has a regular term of 5 years and an > average term of 4 years. So even in Italy the expectation is for > almost full terms.
I guess you're right about that. > Sometimes early elections are the unique way to solve a conflict > peacefully. For example: The coup d'etat in Russia in 1993 was mainly > motivated by the fact that neither the parliament could hold early > presidential elections nor the president could hold early parliamentary > elections. In Russia, the parliament was elected during the communist regime, and therefore had questionable legitimacy. I agree that it would have been better if free parliamentary elections could have come earlier without Yeltsin violating the old constitution. But how do you and Olli extrapolate from that to a country where the parliament is democratically elected? As well, so far we have been talking about the situation where a parliament can dissolve itself. This would have been of no advantage in Russia. Olli wrote: > An old edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica > mocked Americans for letting the stars decide the date of the election and > for a long time after I read that it was difficult for me to take fixed > terms seriously. Considering that "the stars" determine so much of our relationship to government, from when we start voting to when we do our taxes, I don't find this argument persuasive, even if it is delivered with dry British wit. The simplest argument on behalf of fixed terms, as against the British system, is that the government's goal is to stay in power as long as possible despite unpopularity. Any government can stay in power as long as it is popular, but by cleverly timing elections it can hold on a long time even after the public sours on it. Of course, the public has the opposite goal, to have governments it likes. The stars are neutral with respect to the two goals, and therefore their choice of dates is more likely to be in the public's interest. That isn't an argument against the Swedish system, just the British one. --- Blake Cretney
