Electoral Campaigns versus Parliamentary Practice: Do Politicians Pursue the Issues That They Campaigned On?

Politicians’ behavior in legislatures should reflect their electoral promises and policy goals outlined in their manifestos. This is important to ensure both representation and responsiveness in modern democracies. Yet, we do not know if, for instance, specific issues highlighted in election manifestos are of equal importance once the going gets tough in parliament. We investigate this campaign-parliamentary practice-nexus by focusing on the salience variation between election manifestos and parliamentary questions with regard to two prominent issues in the last years: migration and environmental policy. We apply an established dictionary on migration policy and a newly generated one on environmental policy and analyze the variations in 217 manifestos and approx. 17,000 parliamentary questions written and asked by established parties in 34 local councils in Germany (2011-2019). Our results demonstrate that both party- and coalition-level characteristics, as well as contextual factors play an important role for the explanation of the campaign-parliamentary practice-nexus. For example, parties owning an issue show larger congruence in salience levels regarding such issues than other parties. Furthermore, once parties enter a coalition and sign a coalition agreement, this campaign-parliamentary practice-nexus is weakened considerably. These results have broader implications for our understanding of political competition in parliamentary democracies regarding the linkage between electoral campaigns and parliamentary behavior.