The fulfilment of parties’ electoral pledges in Finland, 2015–2019

Multiple studies have by now established that the pledges that parties make in elections have far stronger policy consequences than the general public tends to believe. Previous studies have also highlighted the importance of political institutions. Importantly, parties taking part in coalition cabinets tend to fulfil a smaller share of their pledges than parties governing alone do. Due to its peculiar political system, Finland is an important addition to the set of comparative case studies. For decades, the Finnish party system has been one of the most fragmented ones in Western Europe. The coalition governments that have ruled the country have sometimes covered almost the entire left–right spectrum. The electoral system is a list system with candidate voting, which makes intraparty competition intense while parties’ central organisations have little power over candidate selection. At the same time, parties have strong traditions of programmatic work and publish extensive electoral manifestos. Moreover, the constantly changing patterns of interparty cooperation mean that any party can end up being in government with almost any other party, implying that parties have to be realistic and flexible in their demands. In this study, we do the first systematic analysis of Finnish parties’ electoral pledges and their policy consequences, focussing on a three-party coalition government that was in office from 2015 to 2019. Based on a continuously expanding dataset, we are able to characterise the pledges that different parties have made as well as to draw preliminary conclusions about the extent to which and conditions under which Finnish parties see their pledges fulfilled. We pay special attention to methodological issues that we encounter when analysing Finnish data: parties often formulate their policy goals as demands directed at unspecified other actors, leaving room for interpretation as to what the parties actually pledge to do.