How Important are Electoral Promises?: Assessing the Impact of Electoral Platforms on the Government’s Legislative Agenda

There remain unsettled disagreements as to what constitutes a mandate and how it should be defined (Mansbridge, 2003). On the one hand, some scholars suggest that elections are a gage of confidence and that the elected officials should rule according to their vision (see e.g. Birch, 1971). On the other hand, others propose that the government’s actions should be coherent with the electoral campaign they led, and more specifically, with the manifesto (platform) they presented during that electoral campaign (see e.g. Hofferbert and Budge, 1992). Although the agenda-setting literature suggests a weak role for election pledges in policy dynamics, recent analyses of pledge-to-legislative agenda linkages in the USA (Fagan 2018) and Canada (Birch et al 2018 & 2019) show variable links. Theoretically, this research is at the crossroads between mandate and agenda-setting theories regarding pledge-to-policy linkages. It addresses questions regarding the exercise of election mandates, the influence of the winning party’s pledges on the legislative agenda, and the determinants of variations in pledge-to-legislative agenda determinants. Methodologically, we adopt a new approach to addressing these questions. Rather than coding by broader issue areas, we compare the content of policy proposals (the election promises) contained in the electoral platform to the policy output (the government bills) passed by seven (7) federal governments in Canada. Each bill was manually classified according to the presence or absence of a link to election promises, the policy domains, and the main raison d’être of the bill (i.e., pledge fulfillment, policy modernization, miscellaneous policy initiatives, court decisions, and treaty implementation). Our research spans from 2001 to 2019 for a total of 959 promises made in 7 different elections and 743 government bills introduced during the corresponding parliamentary sessions. Our sample includes four majority, and three minority governments, four of those governments were Liberal and three were Conservative