New Avenues for Comparative Research on Election Pledges

Abstract

This panel presents research that offers significant theoretical and empirical innovations in comparative research on parties’ election pledges, or the promises that parties make to voters during election campaigns. This area of research is of central importance to much of mainstream democratic theory, which posits that parties should offer voters meaningful choices between policy alternatives during election campaigns, and that parties which take office should enact the policies they previously promised to voters. These ideas are prominent in democratic theories that are subsumed under the broad heading of promissory representation, but they are also implied by other accounts of how democratic representation works. Research on the making, breaking and keeping of election pledges has in recent years become more explicitly comparative, theoretically informed, and recognized as a distinct field of inquiry. The Comparative Party Pledges Project (CPPP) is a growing international network of thirty researchers who have aligned their research procedures, and have to date published comparative research on the fulfillment of over 20,000 specific election pledges in twelve countries. Most of the countries included in currently published research are established Western democracies. The quantitative evidence shows that many parties fulfill high proportions of their election pledges (in some cases over 80 percent) if they hold executive office after the elections. The qualitative evidence indicates that many substantively important policy changes were foreshadowed by election pledges. These key findings correct some commonly held misconceptions of parties as promise breakers. Furthermore, the CPPP’s research has developed and tested a range of theoretical propositions regarding the conditions under which parties are most likely to deliver on their campaign promises. The papers in this panel contribute to the cumulative growth of knowledge on election pledges by applying the same established concepts and research procedures as existing CPPP research, while adding significant theoretical and empirical developments. The theoretical advances include formulating and testing new propositions on the conditions under which election pledges are more or less likely to be made and fulfilled, focusing on contexts that have not yet been thoroughly studied. Paper 1 offers important empirical advances by studying the world’s largest democracy; India. Paper 2 compares Turkey, Bulgaria and the U.S. Together, the evidence from these papers help scholars contribute to new discussions in the field, such as how pledges disadvantage certain ethnically, religiously and socially defined groups. This also raises further questions concerning the status of pledge fulfilment in normative democratic theory, which the papers address. Paper 3 studies Canadian election pledges. It determines the extent to which the winning party’s election pledges determine the legislative agenda and priorities of the government as well as what accounts for variations in the influence of pledges on the legislative agenda. Paper 4, lastly, move the research frontier methodologically forward and enables large-scale machine coding of pledges. It comes from a newly started research collaboration between political scientists and computer scientists broadening the scope of election pledge coding using machine coding.

Title	Details
Indian Parties’ Election Pledges and Pledge Fulfilment	View Paper Details
Pledge Making and Fulfillment in Divided Societies: Bulgaria, Turkey and the United States	View Paper Details
An Agenda for Comparative Research on Electoral Pledges: Prospects and Limitations of Human and Machine-Based Methods in Pledge Research	View Paper Details
How Important are Electoral Promises?: Assessing the Impact of Electoral Platforms on the Government’s Legislative Agenda	View Paper Details