It is a popular view that most election promises are broken, but also that voters care about them when it comes to voting. Surprisingly, little scholarly attention has been devoted to the phenomenon. One reason for this could be that possible effects of election promises on vote choice are mediated by political trust: First, political trust influences the perceived trustworthiness of a given election promise. Hence, voters need to perceive politicians to behave with integrity when taking election promises seriously. Second (and vice versa), perceptions regarding broken/kept election promises influence the general trustworthiness of politicians. Since election promises are part of the electoral context and thus non-controllable in survey data research, we conducted a series of three sequential online experiments using given/broken/kept election promises as treatment. We are able to show strong effects of general political trust on the perceived trustworthiness of election promises, but only weak reverted relationships.
