Parliamentary Mandate Fulfilment: An Automated Approach to Measuring Congruence between the Pre- and Post-Electoral Discourse of Parties

The idea that electoral competition, party promises and manifestos are important for how the representative behavior of parties unfolds post-electorally is central to democratic theories of representation. Scholars of Party Mandate fulfillment have for long been focusing methodologically on the number of pre-electoral pledges parties in government manage to realizes. This paper analyses existing research and its limitations and proposes a novel approach for mandate fulfillment studies extending past research (both conceptually and methodologically) by looking at the extent to which the parliamentary discourse of parties matches their electoral discourse. It designs, validates and implements a novel measure of how similar is the pre and post-electoral rhetoric of parties by utilizing recent advances in computational linguistics and the diffusion of text analysis tools in the social sciences. It focuses on the parliaments of four European countries, Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain and by comparing longitudinal electoral manifesto and media data with post-electoral parliamentary data from 2000 to 2017 it attempts to shed light on an empirically understudied side of mandate fulfillment. This research is an integral part of the ERC MAPLE Project, and will draw on the extensive parliamentary data collected over the past two years.