Theoretical and Empirical Advances in the Study of Promissory Representation

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Promissory representation centers on the policy commitments made by parties and candidates to voters during election campaigns. This panel presents some of the latest theoretical and empirical innovations in this thriving field of research. To date, research on promissory representation focused mainly on the congruence between parties’ election pledges and subsequent government policies. This research has provided important insights into the strength of the program-to-policy linkage across different institutional contexts. The papers in this panel show some of the latest advances in this field and include new theory and evidence on why parties make different kinds of promises, the conditions under which promises are kept and broken, and the electoral consequences of election pledges.

Research on election pledges has in recent years become more coordinated, comparative, and recognized as a distinct field of inquiry. The Comparative Party Pledges Project (CPPP) is a growing international network of over fifty researchers who are studying election pledges in different contexts using comparable concepts and measures. The publications of CPPP researchers include comparative research on the fulfillment of over 20,000 specific election pledges in twelve established Western democracies. The quantitative evidence shows that many parties fulfill high proportions of their election pledges (in some cases over 80 percent) if they hold executive office after the elections. The qualitative evidence indicates that many substantively important policy changes were foreshadowed by election pledges. These key findings correct some commonly held misconceptions of parties as promise breakers. The research also developed and tested a range of theoretical propositions regarding the conditions under which parties are most likely to deliver on their campaign promises.

Accounting for unexplored factors that play a role in promissory representation, the papers in this panel advance scholarly knowledge on election pledges by applying the concepts and research procedures as existing CPPP research, while adding significant new theoretical and empirical developments. The first paper by Algra-Maschio et al advances a theory of how unexpected events, economic or natural disasters such as the COVID pandemic, shape the ability of government parties to fulfill election pledges. By doing so, the authors add to existing explanations of pledge fulfillment that have focused primarily on institutional factors. They argue that, contrary to conventional wisdom, some unexpected events are conducive to promise keeping. They test their argument with a mixed-methods approach, including cross-national comparative analyses and newly collected data on Australia, which offers a particularly apt test of the theory.

The Arnold et al paper also engages in theory-building by bringing in insights from political psychology to assess how the rhetorical distance that politicians use affects pledge fulfillment. The argument adds a second dimension to the established distinction between ‘narrow’ and ‘broad’ pledges, i.e. how ‘far away’ (temporally or situationally) is a pledge from the audience to which it is aimed. They argue that when politicians include temporal dimension to a pledge, an indicators that they had thought about it to a greater extent, this facilitates fulfillment.

The third paper in this panel, by Bonilla also applies concepts from political psychology at the level of voters to demonstrate that voters have a nuanced understanding of promises made by candidates. In particular, using survey experiments data, the author shows that voters view promise fulfillment through a partisan lens when an issue is a partisan issue, and particularly when there is ambiguity around if the promise is kept. The fourth paper in the proposed panel builds on existing research by linking pledge making to agenda-setting and issue ownership by political parties, another area that is ripe for exploration by pledge scholars. Fagan and Kostadinova, using longitudinal data from the United States, test the notion that pledge-making has increased overtime. Further, they bring in concepts from political discourse (polarization) and political psychology (in-group preferences) to the forefront in explanations about pledge-making. Taken together, the four papers in this panel extend CPPP concepts, develop new theoretical expectations, and present newly collected data from Australia, Scotland, Sweden, and the United States.

Sub Unit

• Division 14: Comparative Politics of Advanced Industrial Democracies

Cosponsor

• Division 35: Political Organizations and Parties

Individual Presentations

• Keeping Election Campaign Promises When the Unexpected Happens - Frank Rindert Algra-Maschio, Monash University; Sonam Thomas, RMIT ABC Fact Check; Robert Thomson, Monash University

• Election Pledges and the Politics of the Psychological Distance - Christian Arnold, Cardiff University; Hannah Dorothy Bechara, Hertie School of Governance; Slava Jankin Mikhaylov, University of Essex

• Promises Kept, Promises Broken, and Those Caught in the Middle - Tabitha Bonilla, Northwestern University

• Pledge-Making by US Political Parties: A Longitudinal Study - E.J. Fagan, University of Illinois at Chicago; Petia A. Kostadinova, University of Illinois at Chicago

Chair

• Robert Thomson Monash University

Discussants

• Julia Rezazadeh Azari Marquette University

• Petia A. Kostadinova University of Illinois at Chicago