“I Won't Believe It Unless I See It:” The Effect of Geographical Location of Pledge Fulfilment on Its Evaluation by People

Party mandate model expects that citizens are able to recognize and punish non-fulfilment of party pledges. However, the research on people’s evaluations of pledge fulfilment usually finds that they are influenced by their personal attachment to incumbent parties, trust in government parties, general salience of the pledge, etc. In our study, we add the effect of distance of the geographical location of the fulfilment of the pledge to the variables. We follow the distance decay literature known in electoral studies, and argue that the decreasing distance increases the probability that the voter has information about the fulfilment of the pledge by government parties. The fact that the pledge non/fulfilment can be geographically localized closer to some citizens than to the others impacts on the level of information they can get and the salience of the issue for them. People closer to the location of the pledge more likely see the result personally, more likely enjoy the conversations with the informed ones, and the issue is of higher saliency for them. This can influence the spreading of the information only for some citizens, and therefore, to increase the correctness of their evaluation of pledge fulfilment. In the proposed paper we examine the perception of pledge fulfilment at the local level because the pledge is more likely to be connected to a certain location in local election than in national one. Research is conducted as comparative analysis of about 40 municipalities in the Czech Republic which differ significantly in their size. Based on coalition agreements in municipalities we identified localized pledges and determined their non/fulfilment status. Analysis is based on data from exit-poll survey conducted in front of 56 polling places during 2018 and 120 during 2022 local elections covering opinion of 10 000 respondents. In the exit-poll questionnaire, we asked about fulfilment of several pledges embodied in some localities within municipality. We analysed differences in awareness of fulfilment according to factors considered as important in previous studies (issue salience, political knowledge, voting for ruling coalition) and we add geographical distance to location of given pledge. We identified strong effect of distance, especially in the case of fulfilled pledges in medium sized cities. Results can be interpreted as a manifestation of phenomenon labelled as distance decay in information flow.