Election Timing across Autocracy and Democracy (ETAD): A new dataset of national election dates

Abstract

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.