Punished for Performance? Opposition Party Pledge Fulfilment and Election Outcomes

In line with classical theories of party competition and elections, a large body of research shows that governing parties carry out the bulk of their campaign promises. However, despite the absence of a policy mandate, nontrivial shares of opposition party promises are also often enacted. Recent evidence suggests that voters tend to punish governing parties for breaking promises, but little is known about how they react when opposition pledges are fulfilled. We propose that greater pledge fulfilment rates predict worse election performance for opposition parties because they reflect a lack of distinctiveness from governing parties who themselves have an incentive to enact policies which nullify electoral threats. We also form expectations about this relationship’s interaction with institutions, political circumstances and party characteristics. We test the impact of opposition party pledge fulfilment on election performance by combining secondary data sources on campaign promises and election outcomes in several European and North American democracies. Our results suggest that greater pledge fulfilment predicts weaker performance for opposition parties at the ballot box. These novel findings have important implications for the scholarly understanding of the role election pledges and government-opposition dynamics play in party competition.