Promising the Moon: Why Politicians Make Promises They Can’t Keep

• In Event: Policy and Accountability Inside and Outside of Campaigns

Abstract

Existing research in clientelism has paid special attention to the provision of cash and gifts before elections. Yet candidate strategies also frequently include promises of to provide public goods after the election, even in states where resource and capacity constraints make such provision unlikely. What do candidates promise, and how often are those promises fulfilled? This paper uses a combination of survey and experimental data in Ghana and Uganda to evaluate the causes and consequences of making promises in a low-credibility environment. First, I show that promises of ex post provision are by far the most common strategy observed by voters, surpassing in their frequency all other remaining strategies, including vote buying and the provision of quasi-public goods such as scholarships. I then demonstrate that promise-making produces anchoring effects among voters, as voters price the expectation of future provision into their evaluations of candidates. Given that over-promising creates such strong anchoring effects, why do politicians continue to do it? I argue that the prevalence of over-promising is due to a time-inconsistency problem facing candidates during the campaign period. Using a conjoint experiment, I demonstrate that politicians are unlikely to suffer electoral costs for over-promising, and in some cases can actually benefit from doing so. This dynamic gives candidates few incentives to reign in their promise-making during the pre-election period, particularly when the financial returns to holding office are very large.

Author

• Brandon de la Cuesta, Princeton University