Weighting Pledge Fulfilment: A Measure Based on Pledge Salience

During an election campaign, political candidates make a variety of engagements that they pledge to fulfill after the election. A new innovative approach evaluates the congruence between these pledges and their fulfillment: pledge trackers. The existing pledge trackers typically present a score of pledges fulfillment by considering all pledges as equal. The main objective of this article is to use the different indicators of pledge salience identified in existing academic work to conceptualize an aggregate measure tested with exploratory factor analysis, and then to develop a pledge weighting index. The aggregate measure includes four components: salience in parliamentary speeches, in news media, in lobbyists' request and in public opinion surveys. We fielded our own survey on Canadian citizens' perceptions of the importance of pledges and supplemented this data with parliamentary and media data collected through web scraping. This aggregate measure and its index are tested on the Canadian case of the Liberal Party's 2021 election pledges and compared with the results of a non-weighted assessment of pledge fulfillment using the Trudeau Polimeter's data on pledge fulfillment. Results show that the public opinion dimension of salience diverges from the other three components, while these other three components are positively correlated with each other. When the aggregate measure is used to weight pledge assessment, the four dimensions of salience produce a lower overall score of pledge fulfillment than when using the unweighted measure. Results suggest governments' pledge fulfillment can be lower when giving a higher weight to more salient pledges, adding evidence to an emerging literature on pledge salience and fulfillment (Mellon et al., 2021; Bouillaud, 2017).