Research on mandates and election promises tend to treat political parties as entities, rather than as consisting of individual party representatives. However, contents of election manifestos are supposed to meet the public not only via the party leadership, but via face to face encounters between voters and individual local and regional representatives who function as campaign workers during election campaigns. This paper analyses data from the KOLFU 2012 survey of more than 10 000 Swedish local and regional politicians. The paper compares the number of promises politicians think their national election manifesto contained with the actual number. It also analyzes how respondents perceive their own influence on their parties’ pledge making. Preliminary results show that party representatives’ perceived influence on the making of their parties’ pledges is generally low in most parties and municipal contexts, as is their knowledge about what is actually pledged in the party manifestos.
