Election manifestos perform a pivotal role in representative democracy. They offer voters a policy package at election day and afterwards serve as their checklist to evaluate the performance of political parties. Moreover, election manifestos structure the interactions between political parties in the electoral as well as the parliamentary arena, constitute the bargaining material during coalition formations, and significantly shape government policy. It is thereby unsurprising that contemporary political science research draws heavily on these documents in order to understand such political processes and events. As a result, a wide array of analytical tools are available for studying manifestos, including both manual (e.g. the method employed by the Comparative Manifesto Project) and automated forms of content analysis (e.g. Wordscores and Wordfish), and discussions over the up- and downsides of the respective tools remain high on the agenda.
However, despite the scholarly attention devoted to election manifestos, little is known about how they are drafted and what meaning parties themselves ascribe to them. With the exception of some case studies, systematic analyses of how manifestos come into being are missing. This has led to the paradoxical situation in which manifestos are frequently used as inferential tools, despite the lack of (a) comprehensive empirical accounts of their creation, and (b) theoretical models able to explain and predict their guise.
In this paper we aim to remedy this paradox by developing a theoretical model that explains what election manifestos look like. On a theoretical level we provide an answer to the question how we can explain the content of election manifestos. The model posits that the content of manifestos is shaped by three interacting processes: (a) the results of intra-party conflicts over the goals of the party, largely determined by its internal organization; (b) the position of a party in its institutional and strategic environment, and the relevant actors’ beliefs regarding their optimal response; and (c) the learning process induced by past experience. Throughout, we take into account rational-choice and (neo-)institutionalist arguments in order not to restrict the model to one based on functionalist reasoning. We illustrate our model by drawing on cases from four West-European democracies: France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. These countries are selected as they capture most of the variance in the structure and dynamics of West-European party systems.
The proposed theoretical model opens up multiple avenues for future theoretical and empirical work on the drafting process of election manifestos. What is more, it has important implications for the theoretical foundations underlying the use of election manifestos in studies of party competition, mandate fulfillment, and many others.
