There are two points I'd like to address on the issue of exceptional circumstances.
Should you try to specify in a constitutional provision or in legislation when exactly and in what kinds of circumstances an early election could be called? Henry has mentioned the experience of Germany. I'm glad he did, because I happen to know that experience very well .
The Germans in 1949 had a negative prejudice against dissolution--the constitution signers. The constitution makers in 1949 had a negative view of dissolution because of the way it had been used during the previous republic and so on. They created not only federally, but in the various Länder, a setting where elections would occur at very predictable dates unless it were very necessary to call an early election. And they made that very difficult .
Three early elections have been held since 1949. The three circumstances were utterly different. In 1972 it was because the majority of Chancellor Brandt was slipping away and he decided to clear the skies and to call the election early by engineering his own defeat, which was not a very elegant way of getting what he wanted.
The second case occurred 11 years later after a motion had toppled Chancellor Schmidt and put Mr. Kohl in place. Mr. Kohl, having acceded to power without a vote of the population, thought it fit that the people have an opportunity to pronounce on the issue, so again, he engineered his own defeat, which, incidentally, caused a constitutional challenge through the German Constitutional Court.
The third case occurred very recently. I'm sure it's fresh in your minds if you have an interest in German news. The chancellor again engineered his own defeat, and the circumstances are very interesting. He was only one year and three months before the end of his term, yet he had come to the conclusion, which was warranted, I think, that he had totally lost the confidence of the country. Provincial elections, which in Germany are a test for federal governments, had been extremely negative, and so he decided to, again, engineer his own defeat and an early election was called. What struck me, incidentally, is that everybody agreed with it. There was wide consensus within the Bundestag about the elections.
So my point would be, when it comes to exceptional circumstances, try to define this. Try, if you wish, but I don't think it would be very easy to do so and I don't think it would be wise either to do so.