Election Pledges, the Mass Media, and Electoral Outcomes

Abstract

Election pledges are a key feature of representative democracy. Existing research have pushed the research frontier significantly forward by systematically exploring the link between pledges and policies, essentially trying to understand if and when governments stick to their words. This collaborative research, which mostly has taken place within the Comparative Party Pledges Project (CPPP), have previously been published in a series of high-profile publications. Recently, the research community has begun directing its attention to other aspects of pledges and their political correlates, namely voters and the mass media. It is at the intersection between parties, voters and the mass media that we will begin to get a better understanding of the dynamics of pledge-making and -breaking. Why do governments engage in pledge-making in the first place, and how do they chose to communicate about the pledges they make? Does the typical voter pay attention to pledges, let alone rely on them for picking the party to vote for? Does pledge-breaking after the election affect vote chosen later on? And how does the mass media process and report on pledge-making and –breaking? These are vital questions that lacks investigation. This panel brings together researchers from Germany, Scotland, Denmark, and Canada to explore this new research agenda on election pledges. As detailed below, the panel’s first paper (Mathias Bukh Vestergaard) investigates parties’ strategic use of pledges for swaying voters as well as the potential long-term costs this may have in the event of pledge-breaking. The second paper explores (Dufresne et al.) tools to disseminate information about pledges to voters and the mass media, and as such promises both significant academic and social contributions. The third (Theres and Fraser) and fourth (Bøggild and Jensen) papers both study the electoral correlates of pledges: do voters employ pledges when deciding for whom to vote for and when keeping governments accountable in the subsequent election period.

Title	Details
Punished for Performance? Opposition Party Pledge Fulfilment and Election Outcomes	View Paper Details
The Pledge Dilemma: How Parties Prioritize Between Short-Term Electoral Benefits and Long-Term Flexibility in Policy-Making When Communicating About Election Pledges	View Paper Details
Cheap Talk or the Backbone of Representative Democracy? How Voters Use Election Pledges in Electoral Politics	View Paper Details
The Saliency of Election Pledges: Measurement Challenges	View Paper Details
From Electoral Pledges to Coalition Agreements: How Coalition Government Shapes the Programmes-To-Policy Linkage	View Paper Details