Governing under Constraint: Gender Differences in Pledge Fulfilment in Portugal

Scholarship on gender and the executive has developed along two main strands. The bulk of this research focuses on the recruitment of women ministers and the portfolios assigned to them. A second line of inquiry examines their trajectories once in office. The present paper contributes to this latter strand, while addressing a specific issue: the relationship between gender and pledge fulfilment. Although research on the fulfilment of party promises has grown substantially in recent years, the extent to which gender constitutes a relevant factor in explaining promise fulfilment has remained largely neglected. Yet, given the centrality of mandate fulfilment to representative democracy, examining the relationship between gender and the fulfilment of electoral promises represents a key analytical perspective. Existing research on gender and executive politics consistently documents the presence of gender bias, showing that female ministers face more obstacles than their male counterparts in the performance of their roles. Building on this literature, this paper tests the argument that female ministers are, in general, more strongly affected by governing conditions when it comes to pledge fulfilment. In other words, while male ministers tend to display similar levels of compliance across contexts, women’s compliance is more conditional upon the surrounding circumstances. To assess this claim, we examine variation across three sets of conditions: team characteristics, the type of pledge, and the broader governing context. This paper draws on original data on pledge fulfilment at the executive level in Portugal, from 1995 to 2019.