Abstract
Are governments electorally punished for welfare pledge breaking? Is pledge breaking also electorally harmful in the long run? What are the economic and political scope conditions? To answer these questions, we construct a measure of welfare state-related pledge breaking based on manifesto data that allows us to cover 18 democracies since 1970 and combine it with vote share data we trace over three election periods. With regard to short-term effects (t1), we find a strong negative effect of pledge breaking on vote shares. Second, we find that pledge breaking is punished more severely when growth is low. Third, we trace the electoral consequences of government parties’ pledge breaking over two more elections (t2 and t3). We find that the negative effect of pledge breaking vanishes at t3 and can only be identified at t2 if the pledge breaking parties stay in power and the opposition successfully politicizes broken welfare pledges.
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Notes
- 1.
The motivation of Kohl and the CDU/CSU had a moral impetus that deviated from the economic justifications for welfare retrenchment that the junior coalition partner (FDP) provided. It is worth citing this section from Kohl’s inauguration and program here. Not because of the curious attempt to mirror Anglo-Saxon politicians, but because it illustrates that a strong anti-welfare signal (captured by our gap measure) to voters can be send without a discrete promise. “The question of the future is not how much the state can do for its citizens. The question of the future is how liberty, dynamism, and self-responsibility can flourish anew […] Too many have, too long, lived at the expense of others: the state at the expense of its citizens, the citizens at the expense of other citizens […] all of us at the expense of future generations. […] If we continue on the old path without reflection, we expose people to a new kind of alienation of an anonymous, bureaucratic welfare state, just when the social market economy has freed them from the alienation of unfettered capitalism.” (Kohl 1982).
- 2.
All models in Table 5 (appendix) result in similar effects plots. The first three models (13, 14, 15) use an interaction of the pledge gap and politicization to explain vote share changes, based on an if-condition to zoom in on the cases in which the government between t1 and t2 was identical with the one between t0 and t1. Model 16, 17, and 18 get at this relationship with a three-way interaction (i.e., pledge gap at t1 x politicization x t1-t2 cabinet identical with t0-t1). Staying in government (i.e., cabinet continues after t1) is insignificant in terms of main effects and the interaction with the pledge gap in all models we have tried – signaling that it is the interaction with issue politicization that is decisive.
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Horn, A. (2022). Honesty is the Best Policy? The Short- and Long-Term Electoral Costs of (Welfare) Pledge Breaking and Their Economic and Political Scope Conditions. In: Baltz, E., Kosanke, S., Pickel, S. (eds) Parties, Institutions and Preferences. Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-35133-5_10
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