The Saliency of Election Pledges: Measurement Challenges

Over the last decade, academic researchers and producers of online campaign pledge evaluation tools (CPETs) have attracted considerable academic and media attention, notably because of the finding that governing parties do keep their pledges, which contrasts with resilient negative stereotypes to the contrary. This resiliency has led to new questions about the relative importance of election pledges. Most academic studies and CPETs currently attribute the same value to every election pledge. However, pledges are not all created equal. Whether for an existing online tool such as the Canadian Polimetre or for academic investigations of pledges, we address three central questions: (1) How is the saliency of campaign pledges currently measured and used in the academic literature to reflect their relative importance? (2) What are the measurement challenges of devising a meaningful, valid and reliable weighting of election pledges? (3) How should campaign pledges be weighted? In the literature review presented in this paper, we observe that few researchers use some measure of saliency to weight pledges and that there is no consensus on the operationalization of saliency. We propose a definition of pledge saliency and the construction of a measure for weighting pledge saliency by using multiple methods and combining different indicators present in the literature: news media, the political area, public opinion, and experts’ opinion.