Party Mandates and Democracy: Making, Breaking and Keeping Election Pledges

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

This Author meets critics roundtable focuses on research dedicated to studying the making, breaking and fulfillment of campaign promises. The steadily expanding network of the so-called Comparative Party Pledges Project currently consists of over 20 scholars who are developing and applying comparable concepts and methods to study this key aspect of democratic performance. To date, the CPPP has made detailed qualitative assessments of the fulfillment of over 20,000 campaign promises made in 57 election campaigns in 12 countries. The roundtable aims both to review and critique the work to date, and to assess and advise future work in the field.

The review and critique of the work to date will focus on CPPP’s latest milestone, the March 2019 publication of the book Party Mandates and Democracy. Making, Breaking, and Keeping Election Pledges in Twelve Countries (Naurin, Royed and Thomson eds. 2019. University of Michigan Press). The book was preceded by an article in American Journal of Political Science (Thomson et al. 2017), which was selected to be part of the journal’s Second Viral Issue with papers that are “especially relevant to major issues in democracy and governance today.” The book and related AJPS article provide the first large-scale systematic comparative analysis of the fulfillment of election pledges. Authors use a mixed-methods approach, relying on both cross-national quantitative analysis and country studies. The CPPP covers a broad range of countries and elections, including the United States, Canada, nine Western European countries, and Bulgaria.

The review and critique will focus on the theoretical and empirical contributions previously made by the CPPP. The authors set out to clarify the role of campaign promises in democratic theory, arguing that they are key elements of mainstream democratic theory or “promissory representation.” The main theories of party competition, argue CPPP researchers, lead us to expect parties to offer both specificity and choice in terms of the promises they make to voters during election campaigns. Turning to explanations of the fulfillment or breaking of campaign promises, the CPPP has focused partly on the impact of power-sharing arrangements among governing parties. The empirical contributions of the CPPP include the development of common concepts and procedures for identifying election pledges and testing their fulfillment. The key findings have demonstrated the prominence of specific election pledges in campaigns across a range of established democracies. Parties make large numbers of specific promises on electorally salient issues, and there is evidence that parties have generally been making larger numbers of election pledges in more recent years. Contrary to conventional wisdom a majority of pledges—sometimes a large majority—are acted upon in most countries, most of the time. More detailed analyses have revealed the impact of power-sharing arrangements, particularly the distinction between single-party executives and coalition governments, on the likelihood of pledge fulfillment, among other factors.

The assessment of the ongoing and future research on campaign pledges will focus on a selection of theoretical and empirical advances. In terms of theory development and testing, some researchers in the CPPP are formulating more refined explanations of the conditions under which campaign promises are likely to be fulfilled or broken. For example, the CPPP’s early work focused on the allocation of ministerial portfolios as an explanation of pledge fulfilment in coalition governments. More advanced research is specifying the effects of portfolio allocation in a more nuanced way, by taking into account the potential for ministerial drift and the contents of the agreements reached between coalition partners. In terms of methods, some members of the CPPP are developing ways of supporting the qualitative research process with automated text analysis involving natural language processing algorithms. The empirical research of the CPPP is expanding to include new elections and countries, including a more specific focus on campaign promises made by populist parties. The new cases being added include both established Western style democracies, such as Australia, and emerging and non-Western democracies, such as Ukraine and India. Finally, in a related line of research, scholars are conducting comparative research on citizens’ evaluations of pledge fulfillment. This addresses the puzzle of why there is a disjoint between comparative political science research, which finds considerable evidence of promise keeping, and widespread public opinion, which holds that politicians generally do not keep their promises. It also addresses questions on how voters use election pledges when holding governments accountable.

Apart from editors of the book, four critics take part in the roundtable: Michael McDonald (Binghamton University), Bingham G. Powell (University of Rochester), Petra Schleiter, (Oxford University), and Jae-Jae Spoon (University of Pittsburgh).

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 11: Comparative Politics

Chair

• Petra Schleiter University of Oxford

Presenters

• Elin Naurin University of Gothenburg

• Robert Thomson Monash University

• G. Bingham Powell University of Rochester

• Jae-Jae Spoon University of Pittsburgh

• Michael D. McDonald SUNY, Binghamton University

• Terry J. Royed University of Alabama