Citizens’ Evaluations of Pledge Fulfillment in Six Countries

While most research on election pledges examines the extent to which governing parties fulfill their previous campaign promises, this paper examines citizens’ evaluations of whether governing parties fulfil their promises. Relying on recent national election surveys, we compare citizens’ evaluations of the fulfillment of 36 specific campaign pledges in Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Portugal, Sweden and the United-States. We find that citizens’ evaluations are accurate (they match actual government performance) 62% of the time on average. We formulate and test several explanations of the variation in the extent to which citizens evaluate promise-keeping and breaking accurately. Part of the analysis distinguishes among the pledges in terms of the extent to which political elites emphasize each of the pledges. The results indicate that political knowledge significantly increases the accuracy of pledge evaluations, as does the intensity of media coverage of individual pledges. We find that the accuracy of evaluations is affected by respondents’ perceptual biases, which are unrelated to political facts. Perceptual shortcuts (e.g. governing party identification) lead to accurate evaluations when government performance conforms to the expected stereotype (that the governing party fulfilled its pledge) but they lead to misevaluations when government performance does not conform to the expected stereotype (that the governing party broke its pledge). On balance, accurate evaluations stemming from the use of perceptual shortcuts significantly outweigh misevaluations. Although the relationship between accuracy of citizens’ evaluations, perceptual shortcuts and political knowledge varies depending on national contexts, our comparative data suggest that citizens in advanced democracies are able to hold governments accountable in their evaluations.