Advances in Research on Parties’ Election Pledges

Abstract

Election pledges play a central role in the theory and practice of representative democracy. According to several theoretical approaches to representative democracy, we should expect that competing parties not only provide policy alternatives to the voters but also seek to implement those alternatives once in power. The pledges that parties make in their campaigns indeed often lead to notable policy changes, Brexit being a well-known example. In recent years, parties’ election pledges have received increased scholarly attention. Research on election pledges has become more explicitly comparative as scholars studying different cases have made efforts to coordinate their methodological choices, especially under the auspices of the Comparative Party Pledges Group (CPPG). The research programme has moreover become more theory-driven. For example, scholars’ coordinated efforts have produced knowledge about the ways in which power-sharing structures affect the linkages between pledges and policies, this knowledge being highly relevant to broader discussions on political institutions and programmatic aspects of politics. This panel presents new advances in research on election pledges. It brings together scholars analysing data from several countries or investigating the theoretical foundations of pledge research. The field is constantly moving forward as new research questions arise, new methodological tools are applied and new cases are added to the set of comparable case studies. Paper 1 (Naurin, Thomson, Hovy, Fornaciari and Runeson) discusses an important empirical advance, the identification of election pledges in the social media. Paper 2 (McMillan) asks whether voters are aware of party election pledges. Paper 3 (Matthieß and Müller) also addresses the stages of the pledges-to-policy linkage by analysing what kinds of issues parties emphasise with their election pledges. Paper 4 (Nikama) goes beyond the conventional empirical definition of an election pledge as a clear commitment included in a party’s electoral manifesto and discusses the relationship between election pledges and trust theoretically. Paper 5 (Ylisalo and Makkonen) reports preliminary results about the policy consequences of parties’ election pledges in Finland, a country where most parties have strong traditions of programmatic work while the electoral system encourages strong intraparty competition.

Title	Details
Empty Promises or the Real Deal? Voter Awareness of Election Pledges During the Campaign	View Paper Details
No tolerance for parties breaking their promises? What citizens (do not) want from their parties	View Paper Details
A trust based understanding of electoral promises	View Paper Details
The fulfilment of parties’ electoral pledges in Finland, 2015–2019	View Paper Details