Replication files for the section '3. Conditional off-schedule election timing' of 'Masaaki Higashijima, Naoki Shimizu, Hidekuni Washida, and Yuki Yanai (2025) Election Timing across Autocracy and Democracy (ETAD): A new dataset of national election dates'

We introduce the Election Timing across Autocracy and Democracy (ETAD) dataset, which provides comprehensive data on the timing of the national elections in autocracies and democracies between 1945 and 2023. ETAD covers 3,127 legislative and presidential elections in 148 countries. Various research agendas have targeted election timing, but no global dataset measuring precise timing has been available. ETAD provides scholars with detailed information on election timing, including which date an election was held, how many days an election was accelerated or delayed from the initially scheduled date, and why the election timing was changed. ETAD has three distinct features. First, it covers legislative and presidential elections in both autocracies and democracies. Second, it records dates, which allows researchers to operationalize early or delayed elections following their specific purposes. Third, it identifies the major reasons for timing changes, helping us better understand governments’ strategies of changing election timing. ETAD improves our understanding of electoral behavior, institutional constraints, and regime dynamics by bridging gaps in existing research and enabling nuanced analyses. To demonstrate that, we present a research example about opportunistic election timing. The ETAD dataset and its codebook can be downloaded from the author’s website or installed as an R package.

我们介绍了威权与民主政体选举时机（Election Timing across Autocracy and Democracy, ETAD）数据集，该数据集涵盖了1945年至2023年间全球威权与民主政体的全国性选举时机的全面数据。ETAD 覆盖了148个国家的3127场议会与总统选举。尽管已有诸多研究议题围绕选举时机展开，但目前尚无可精准测算选举时机的全球性数据集。ETAD 为学者提供了关于选举时机的详尽信息，包括选举实际举办日期、相较于初始计划日期提前或延后的天数，以及选举时机变更的具体原因。该数据集具备三大显著特征：其一，覆盖威权与民主政体下的议会及总统选举；其二，记录了选举具体日期，可支持研究者根据自身研究目的对提前或延后选举进行操作化定义；其三，明确了选举时机变更的主要动因，有助于我们更深入地理解政府调整选举时机的策略逻辑。ETAD 通过填补现有研究空白、支持精细化分析，深化了我们对选举行为、制度约束与政体动态的认知。为验证这一点，我们展示了一个关于机会主义选举时机的研究案例。ETAD 数据集及其编码手册可从作者个人网站下载，或通过R程序包进行安装。