Who Gets Promises? How Electoral Campaigns Shape Representation of Marginalized Groups

Across established democracies, research consistently shows that public policy underrepresents the interests of marginalized constituencies. Building on Pepper Culpepper’s argument about “quiet politics”, we argue that electoral campaigns may partly counterbalance these inequalities. Because campaigns make policy proposals visible and electorally consequential, they create incentives for parties and candidates to broaden the focus of representation beyond the powerful groups that dominate in less visible policymaking arenas. We expect this dynamic to benefit marginalized constituencies, especially, but not exclusively, among left-wing parties. We test these expectations using an original dataset of more than 8,0000 electoral pledges made by French and German executives over the past three decades (1995-2022). Based on manual coding, we identify the target populations directly affected by each pledge, aggregate them into 94 main target populations, distinguish between positive and negative targeting, and assess the power resources of these groups. This coding allows us to compare how electoral pledges distribute benefits and burdens across groups with different levels of power. Our findings show that targeted pledges are common in both countries and that beneficial pledges frequently address marginalized and powerless constituencies. Yet electoral program-making does not simply reverse existing power structures: powerful groups, especially enterprises, remain highly visible as both beneficiaries and targets of burdens. We also find important partisan and cross-national differences. Left-wing parties tend to direct more benefits toward powerless groups and more burdens toward powerful groups, while right-wing parties more often display a less redistributive pattern. France shows a particularly strong tendency to direct benefits toward powerless groups, whereas negative targeting in Germany is more concentrated on powerful groups, especially enterprises. These findings suggest that campaigns can broaden representation, even if they do not fully escape existing power structures. They therefore point to the need to study representational inequality as a process unfolding across stages - from electoral program-making to post-electoral policymaking.