Promissory representation and group politics: A survey experimental test on voters’ reactions to group targeted pledge performances

When and how do voters respond to group targeted pledge (non-)fulfilment? While research on the reasons why pledges are (not) fulfilled has been growing in the last couple of years, voters' reactions to government pledge fulfilment is still understudied. Previous research on citizens' retrospectively oriented reactions has mainly focused on studying the effects of a government's performance (sociotropic or egocentric) unrelated to election pledges. While there is initial evidence that voters punish governments for breaking their pledges, we still lack knowledge to which kind of pledges voters respond in a positive or negative way. We acknowledge the growing importance of group targeting and mobilization, i.e., the fact that parties make election pledges addressing specific groups of voters positively or negatively, such as business owners or migrants. We argue that two factors affect how voters react to the fulfilment of targeted election pledges: 1) their perceived deservingness of the target group and 2) their individual belonging to that group. To assess how voters respond to group targeted pledge (non-)fulfilment, we rely on a survey experiment based on real broken or fulfilled election pledges conducted during the election campaign for the 2021 legislative elections in Germany and for the 2022 presidential election in France (N = 12,000). We study voters’ reactions at different levels: specific support (performance evaluation of government and voting) as well as diffuse support (political trust and democratic satisfaction). The findings of this study have major implications for our understanding of promissory representation, group politics and policy feedbacks.