The Impact of Elites on the Making, Breaking and Keeping of Campaign Promises

Abstract

This panel examines the impact of elites on the making, breaking and keeping of promises made by candidates during election campaigns. The level of congruence between what candidates promise to voters during election campaigns and what governments deliver after those elections is a key stage of the democratic process. Promissory representation refers to the idea, which is found in a range of mainstream democratic theories, that candidates make promises that are either kept or broken by subsequent governments. In the practice of politics, politicians often claim to hold a mandate to enact the promises they made in previous election campaigns. Notwithstanding criticism of the idea that election results convey a mandate to enact particular policies, campaign promises and their subsequent fate deserve sustained research attention. Research in this field is relevant to the choice parties offer voters. Moreover, comparisons of the likelihood of promises being kept in different contexts reveal the impact of institutions and individual policymakers on government policymaking. The papers in this panel examine promissory representation within a coherent conceptual framework that focuses on election pledges. Pledges are campaign statements that are specific and testable enough to enable researchers to assess with a high level of agreement whether or not they have been fulfilled. This framework has been developed by the Comparative Party Pledges Project (CPPP), a group of 20 researchers, who have assembled a qualitative and quantitative dataset of over 20,000 election pledges made in 57 election campaigns in 12 countries. The CPPP is expanding in terms of theory, methods, and new evidence, and this panel contains four papers that present new work in each of these areas. The paper by Dumont et al. develops and tests a new micro-level theory of pledge fulfilment, which focuses on the allocation of ministerial portfolios and characteristics of the individual politicians who hold these offices. In contrast, previous explanations of variation in pledge fulfilment have focused mainly on broad comparisons across governments and the impact of power-sharing arrangements on the likelihood that governing parties are able to fulfil their election pledges. The paper by Carson et al. presents new evidence on the fulfilment of election pledges in Australia, which provides new opportunities to compare pledge fulfilment in single-party governments. It devotes particular attention to how the political experience of relevant ministers affects pledge fulfilment. The paper by Müller presents new work on methods for studying election pledges that involve machine learning. Müller’s paper examines whether machine learning can develop an automated procedure that replicates the judgements humans make when identifying pledges from texts with similar levels of reliability. This method is particularly relevant to identifying pledges made and repeated by individual candidates during campaigns. Finally, the paper by Pétry et al. offers a new perspective on pledge fulfilment that focuses on citizens’ perceptions of pledge fulfilment in six countries using evidence from public opinion surveys. The paper distinguishes between pledges in terms of the extent to which they are emphasised by political elites.