Empty Promises or the Real Deal? Voter Awareness of Election Pledges During the Campaign

While voters are more pessimistic about the enactment of campaign promises than they perhaps ought to be, studies show that citizens have a better-than-expected awareness of the fulfilment status of specific pledges. Furthermore, a nascent body of research suggests that these perceptions matter for government performance evaluations and vote choice. However, these retrospective studies focus on the end-stage of the process. Little is known about the earliest link in the chain of promissory representation, when voters evaluate promises prospectively during the short but crucial campaign period. Are voters even aware of party election pledges, and which characteristics – of individuals and promises – might predict this knowledge? Drawing upon research on political knowledge, citizen responsiveness and election pledge perceptions, we anticipate that voters are only dimly aware of election pledges and have trouble distinguishing legitimate promises from fake ones. We also develop expectations surrounding the sociodemographic, attitudinal and pledge-level predictors of pledge awareness and test them using data collected for the 2021 Scottish Election Study. Our findings have important implications for the scholarly understanding of individual-level mechanisms underlying processes of promissory representation. They also hold relevance for real-life political communication and may be of particular interest to party strategists and manifesto authors.