Pledge-Making by US Political Parties: A Longitudinal Study

• In Event: Theoretical and Empirical Advances in the Study of Promissory Representation

Abstract

Much of the recent growth in the scholarly study of election pledges has focused on the factors that shape the former’s fulfillment, across different institutional and political contexts, testing assumptions of the mandate theory of representation. Understanding trends in the number and type of election pledges that political parties make, though, has implications beyond policy actions once in office. Electoral campaigns, including pledges, are the primary means through which candidates and parties communicate with voters, their rivals, the media, and the broader public. Messages that parties issue during campaigns service to signal their positions on issues, including the salience of such issues, and broadly, they facilitate the ideological positioning of candidates and parties.

Literature on pledge-making (e.g. Håkansson and Naurin, 2016) has noted that the professionalization and mediazation of politics in established democracies is expected to lead to an increase the number of pledges that they make overtime. Further, increased polarization of political discourse is associated with further differentiation in the positions that parties take in each election. Finally, literature in political psychology suggests that, particularly in divide societies like the United States, parties signal in-group preferences by promising explicit benefits to some groups while making commitments to ‘punish’ others.

We explore these arguments through newly collected data on pledge-making by the two major political parties in the United States, for the period 1970-2016. We code each quasi-sentence in the parties’ pre-election platforms on if it contains a pledge that follows established scholarly definitions (Naurin et al 2018). We differentiate between ‘narrow’ and ‘broad’ pledges. Each quasi-sentences is also coded in one of 20 distinct categories following the Comparative Agenda’s Project coding scheme. Through this dataset we are able to answer the following questions: what share of US party platforms are dedicated to ‘pledges’ as defined by scholars and how did this share fluctuate over time? How is change in ‘issue ownership’ between the two parties reflected in the pledges that parties make on these issues? How do the pledges made by US parties reflect the latter’s most loyal voters? When the formal agenda lurches toward other issues, do parties abandon their promises or continue devote scarce agenda space toward them? Further by coding US data in such a longitudinal way, we can take notice of single pledge repetitions within a given platform as one signal of the pledge’s salience. Finally, we can ascertain whether distinctions between the parties increased over time, as a symptom of growing polarization in the country.

Authors

• E.J. Fagan, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Petia A. Kostadinova, University of Illinois at Chicago