Political Partisanship, Elite Knowledge and Policy Evaluation. A Study of Politicians’ Assessments of Government’s Fulfillment of Election Promises.

A democratic system has to be able to identify failures and achievements of governments in power. Central in this process are politicians themselves. In a functional democracy an opposition should address the shortcomings of the government and a responsible government should be able to admit their failures. Similarly, an opposition should be able to correctly evaluate policy performance that speaks in favor of the government. In short, polarization between parliamentarians ought not take over knowledgeable and rational evaluations of actual policy performance. Nonetheless, the relation between policy performance and policy evaluation is challenged by partisanship. This study examines whether and why knowledge and rational evaluations triumph partisanship when politicians are asked to evaluate specific policies the government has promised to implement. By asking 1400 Swedish politicians (MPs and candidates to the national parliament) to evaluate specific policies, we investigate the relation between real world condition and partisanship for policy evaluations. Results show that the government parliamentarians are less affected by their partisanship and more affected by correct information than are the opposition parliamentarians. Implications are discussed that include how politicians are steered by different types of heuristics and cues depending on what positions they currently have and how pressured they are in their own political career. Data comes from specifically designed survey items in the Comparative Candidates Survey 2010 and the Swedish National Election Study 2010.