Pledge Making and Fulfillment in Divided Societies: Bulgaria, Turkey and the United States

This project adds to the democratic representation literature by assessing election pledges, and their fulfillment, through a constituency perspective. We ask: How does pledge making and fulfillment vary in countries with deeply-rooted ethnic, racial, and religious cleavages? Do parties increasingly make pledges that promise to favor, or disadvantage, some groups of voters, especially exacerbating ascriptive voter characteristics? To address these questions, we collect data on pledges and their fulfillment, in three countries with prominent ethnic, racial, and religious cleavages: Bulgaria, Turkey, and the United States. These countries, which share the presence of politically relevant ascriptive cleavages, are also examples of contexts with different democratic experiences, and institutional set-ups. We code the election programs of the governing parties over the following time periods: Bulgaria 1990-2017; Turkey 2002-2015; United States, 2000-2016. As a novel contribution to pledge studies, we develop a coding that distinguishes between constituency-based and general pledges. In particular, we define a pledge as constituency-specific if it alleviates concentrated costs or adds concentrated benefits to a specific constituency; or if it adds concentrated costs or reduces concentrated benefits to a specific constituency. The costs and benefits can occur in material and symbolic forms. Pledges that do not fall into either category are coded as mass appeal pledges. The issue of which constituencies political parties represent and to what extent their pledges are focused on constituency-specific demands reflects which groups get to be represented in politics and policy, and which ones are likely to be underrepresented or even penalized. More broadly, such distinctions reflect the extent to which democratic political systems produce political equality at the group level. Incorporating constituency-specific pledges in the study of pledge fulfillment helps assess the implications of pledge fulfillment on representation dynamics of different groups and constituencies to highlight potentially increasing group-level inequality.