Cheap Talk or the Backbone of Representative Democracy? How Voters Use Election Pledges in Electoral Politics

Election pledges are a vital part of modern democracy. In most election campaigns, the parties competing for votes make numerous pledges about what they intend to do if they gain power after the election. For voters, pledges can serve two purposes: to help choose between parties before elections by selecting the party whose pledges they prefer; and to hold parties accountable after elections by punishing parties that do not keep their pledges. As such, pledges are the core mechanism linking voters and their elected representatives. Regardless of parties’ use of pledges, we know very little about whether and how pledges matter for vote choice. Many scholars view pledges with great cynicism. One of the founding fathers of political science observed that “party platforms are fatuities; they persuade no one, deceive no one, and enlighten no one”. Election pledges are, in short, nothing but “cheap talk” – and voters know it and therefore ignore them. Yet there is also anecdotal evidence that voters punish politicians when they break a pledge. President George Bush, for instance, probably lost the 1992 election to Bill Clinton because he raised taxes despite previously having promised, “Read my lips: no new taxes”. In a similar vein, the popularity of French President François Hollande took a tumble after he failed to deliver on a string of high-profile promises. And the Danish Thorning-Schmidt government, in power from 2011 to 2015, was known as “the pledge-breaking government” (løftebrudsregeringen) and might have suffered in the polls as a result. Employing a panel survey with 6,000 nationally representative Danes interviewed three times over the duration of a year, the paper presents the first systematic test of the effect of real-world pledge-making on voters’ (1) awareness of pledges during an election campaign, (2) vote choice and (3) subsequent blame-attribution in the first year of the electoral cycle.