Abstract
This chapter addresses three questions about the relationship between political discourse and action: Do political parties keep their promises once elected? What are the methodologies used by scholars to demonstrate that political parties keep (or do not keep) their campaign promises? Are these methodologies valid and reliable? We answer these questions based on a review of 18 journal articles and book chapters published in English and French over the past forty years that report quantitative measures of election promise fulfillment in North America and Europe. We find that parties fulfill 67% of their promises on average, with wide variation across time, countries, and regimes. Most studies have major methodological weaknesses (no operational definition, no mention of relevant documentation, flawed research design) although the more recent ones tend to show higher levels of methodological sophistication and a modicum of scientific transparency.
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- 1.
The two postulates of the mandate theory, although inspired by Downs’ (1957) economic theory of elections, are somewhat at odds with Downs’ theory. Unlike the mandate theory which assumes that party platforms differ, Downs’ theory assumes that politicians offer platforms that converge toward the median voter equilibrium. In a context of identical (or very similar) party platforms, the information costs are very high, thereby precluding voters from making prospective assessments of what the winning party will do after the election. Rational voters do not differentiate between the policy priorities of the competing parties. They will support a party on the basis of heuristic shortcuts such as their retrospective assessment of the performance of the incumbent in office, or party ideology. Therefore, party manifestos should not be expected to be of much significance in elections.
- 2.
Another positive theory of why politicians keep their campaign promises is Marxism. Marxism considers that the political agenda is controlled by a dominant elite working on behalf of capitalist interests. It is the same ruling elite that is at the origin of election program discourse and of the decisions of the government. The congruence between the electoral discourse and the government action discourse is no coincidence according to Marxist theory: It should be expected because the two discourses are echoes of one another. According to Marxist theory, party platforms—at least the platforms of the more conventional non-extremist parties—are used by the ruling elite as a ploy to manipulate the popular classes into believing that they have a choice at election time. Ultimately, election promises are used to defuse potential popular uprising against the capitalist state’s chosen policy direction. From a Marxist perspective, the study of the correlation between election promises and government actions is scientifically futile. Marxist theory is therefore of no use to someone interested in studying whether governments do what they say.
- 3.
The number of cases is greater than the number of studies because some studies display more than one case.
- 4.
There are 12 questions about specific policy proposals in the NPAT. Ringquist and Dasse recoded the answers in a new binary variable. A score of 0 means an anti-environmental response and 1 for a pro-environmental response.
- 5.
The conjecture is explicitly laid out by Royed (1996). Her study only applies to President Reagan in the US and Prime Minister Thatcher in Britain. Her conclusion that election promises are kept more often in a parliamentary regime than in a presidential regime cannot, therefore, be considered generally valid until tested across a larger sample of countries.
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Acknowledgment:
The authors wish to thank Gerald Miller for his stimulating comments on an earlier version of this paper.
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Pétry, F., Collette, B. (2009). Measuring How Political Parties Keep Their Promises: A Positive Perspective from Political Science. In: Imbeau, L. (eds) Do They Walk Like They Talk?. Studies in Public Choice, vol 15. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-89672-4_5
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