The Political Theory of Pledge-Fulfillment

Intersections

The article presents a theoretical synthesis that could serve as the conceptual framework for empirical studies of the fulfilment of electoral pledges in modern democracies. Studies related to the program-to-policy linkage derived their hypotheses, for the most part, from an implicit, common sense model of mandate theory. The article presents a realistic version of positive mandate theory, one that is stripped of its normative assumptions and is suitable for empirical testing. It is informed by five theoretical building blocks: the concept of the binding mandate, the party theory of representation, the doctrine of responsible party government, modern normative mandate theory and the conceptual pair of delegation and mandate. The resulting framework incorporates the information content of the campaigns, the definiteness of the authorization and the strength of pledge enactment as its core components.

Intersections, 2018

The article presents a theoretical synthesis that could serve as the conceptual framework for empirical studies of the fulfilment of electoral pledges in modern democracies. Studies related to the program-to-policy linkage derived their hypotheses, for the most part, from an implicit, common sense model of mandate theory. The article presents a realistic version of positive mandate theory, one that is stripped of its normative assumptions and is suitable for empirical testing. It is informed by five theoretical building blocks: the concept of the binding mandate, the party theory of representation, the doctrine of responsible party government, modern normative mandate theory and the conceptual pair of delegation and mandate. The resulting framework incorporates the information content of the campaigns, the definiteness of the authorization and the strength of pledge enactment as its core components.

Intersections, 2016

Despite the substantive findings of existing research, the electoral mandate is still an elusive category in representation theory and empirical political science. The article offers a conceptual framework that promises to properly evaluate mandate fulfillment in general, and pledge fulfillment in particular from the standpoint of the normative theory of representation. In this framework the non-fulfillment of pledges is not necessarily bad for representation since mandate slippage, or the gradual process of abandoning the mandate in the post-election phase, may come in both bad and good forms. The proposed framework also develops an empirical research agenda for measuring the causes of bad mandates and mandate slippage by relying and expanding on the toolkit of empirical pledge research. Outcome oriented pledges serve as a prime example of bad mandates, whereas agency shirking is a major cause of bad mandate slippage.

2021

Political parties communicate their plans to voters via promises made during election campaigns. While it has been found that governments generally take these promises they make seriously, it has also been established that many voters believe otherwise. Less is known, however, about whether governments are held to account for the extent to which they fulfil their promises. This dissertation examines the effects of broken and fulfilled election pledges on voter evaluations of government performance. The findings challenge the idea that rewards and punishments for election pledge performance are straightforwardly administered by voters, instead emphasising that pledge-based accountability processes are asymmetric and affected by the biases of voters. The main conclusion is that pledge fulfilment is not the procedural value for voters suggested in some classical theoretical contributions. Instead, while most voters find it important that election promises are not broken, they find it e...

Do parties keep the promises they make before elections? What explains why some governments fulfill more election promises than others? This article provides the first truly comparative analyses of parties' pledge fulfillment to address these questions. We study the fulfillment of 14,665 election pledges made in campaigns prior to the formation of forty-eight governments in twelve countriesand the United States. This allows us to examine the effects of partisan control of executive office, power-sharing arrangements and economic conditions on pledge fulfillment. We find that parties fulfill their election pledges to a considerable extent, thereby challenging the conventional view of parties as pledge-breakers. The degree to which a given party controls policymaking affects pledge fulfillment: institutions matter. Economic conditions also affect the probability of pledge fulfillment for some, but not all, types of pledges.

There are many studies analysing the ability of parties to enact their election pledges. Most of these focus on established Western democracies and conclude that pledges made by parties that enter the government after elections are more likely to be enacted than those made by parties stuck in opposition. As the ability to keep election promises has important consequences for the quality of democracy, it is important to extend the analyses to the Central and Eastern European countries. We find a lack of such studies, however. This article seeks to make a contribution in this area. In this paper we analyse the case of the Czech Republic from 2002 to the parliamentary elections in 2013. The analysis includes pledges given in electoral manifestos by the two main parties in that period, the Czech Social Democratic Party and the Civic Democratic Party, which alternated in coalition governments. Unlike other studies from this region, we focus on a longer period, not just the last elections, so the results reflect a longer term trend, and not just the current situation. In the total sample of 1800 pledges made by the two parties in three elections we found that there is a larger success rate in keeping promises for the governing party; the ČSSD fulfilled fewer pledges when they were in power than the ODS. Surprisingly, the Social democrats had a greater percentage of enacted pledges while they were in opposition than in government. The analysis shows the shift in the composition of manifestos since the 2006 elections and the thematic composition of pledges and different success ratios among them.

2010

The program-to-policy linkage refers to the level of congruence between what political parties promise during election campaigns, as set out in their election programs, and the policies delivered by governments after elections. The program-to-policy linkage is an important element of modern democratic theory. Moreover, institutionalist theories predict variation in the strength of the linkage according to the extent to which parties hold control over the levers of power. For instance, we expect a stronger linkage for parties that go on to form single-party governments that control both the executive and legislative branches after the elections than for parties that must share power. In coalition governments, we expect that control over relevant ministerial portfolios is a key explanatory factor. Over time, economic conditions should also affect the types of policy commitments parties make and the ability of governing parties to deliver on those commitments. In this paper we examine the program-to-policy linkage by focusing on election pledges: campaign policy commitments that are specific enough for researchers to test whether they were fulfilled during the subsequent governing period. We study the fulfillment of 6,552 election pledges in four countries (the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Ireland) over a thirty-year period, from the 1970s to early 2000s. Particular attention is given to the fulfillment of the 3,576 pledges made by parties that controlled the presidency or entered single-party or coalition governments after the elections. The countries and time periods selected contain considerable variation in institutional conditions, including single-party governments (in the UK and Ireland), divided governments (in the US), coalition governments (Ireland and the Netherlands) and minority governments (Ireland). The cases selected also contain variation in economic conditions. We also report on ongoing collaborate research in which we and other colleagues are studying election pledges in eleven countries.

European Political Science

Not only the content, but also the context of election pledges should affect how voters respond to broken and fulfilled pledges. Borrowing from other disciplines, the hypotheses in this study propose that voters with low expectations reward pledge fulfilment more than voters with high expectations, while voters with high fulfilment expectations punish pledge-breakers more severely than voters with low expectations. A survey experiment using real-life political events was designed where 2465 respondents first received information that either significantly raised or lowered their expectations of pledge fulfilment. They were then presented with the actual fulfilment status of the pledge, either confirming or disconfirming their manipulated expectations, and asked to give their perceptions of the governing party’s performance. Interestingly, the findings support the presence of a confirmation, not a disconfirmation bias, suggesting that pledge performance attitudes are formed more simil...

Despite the substantive findings of existing research, the electoral mandate is still an elusive category in representation theory and empirical political science. The article offers a conceptual framework that promises to properly evaluate mandate fulfillment in general, and pledge fulfillment in particular from the standpoint of the normative theory of representation. In this framework the non-fulfillment of pledges is not necessarily bad for representation since mandate slippage, or the gradual process of abandoning the mandate in the post-election phase, may come in both bad and good forms. The proposed framework also develops an empirical research agenda for measuring the causes of bad mandates and mandate slippage by relying and expanding on the toolkit of empirical pledge research. Outcome oriented pledges serve as a prime example of bad mandates, whereas agency shirking is a major cause of bad mandate slippage.

European Journal of Political Research, 2008

This article studies the relationship between electoral policy proposals and subsequent government actions in the case of minority governments. Content analysis of electoral pledges of Spanish parties is utilised to study the gains that a relatively small party obtains when it helps to sustain the governing party in office without entering a coalition government. According to the authors' results, cooperating in parliament to maintain the minority government in office can be a rational choice for a party because it allows it to obtain significant gains in terms of programme fulfillment.