How (un-)equal is pledge-making? Marginalized groups and elected executives’ pledges in France and Germany (1995-2022)

Across a wide range of democracies, a burgeoning literature has revealed that public policy fails to represent the interests of a range of marginalized constituencies. But where does unequal representation start? Pepper Culpepper’s argument on quiet politics suggests that politicization mitigates inequalities in policy-making. This would imply that, in particular, policies politicized in campaigns have the potential to rebalance representation. Despite the key implications of this assumption, we lack empirical evidence as to how marginalized groups are represented in campaigns, what we call "input representation". Do campaigns represent groups deprived of power resources? Or do political inequalities permeate pledges before the policymaking process even begins? We hypothesize that electoral incentives will lead pledge-makers to target populations beyond the powerful groups prevailing in policymaking: to mobilize as many voters as possible, pledges are devised to appeal to a broad range of social groups, including less powerful groups. We test our argument in two contrasted political systems (France and Germany) with a focus on the pledges that have the most potential to shape policymaking – those made by the parties or candidates that are in executive office after the election. Covering more than two decades and about 8,000 pledges coded with respect to the target populations they affect, we reveal that the majority of executive pledges benefit groups identified as disadvantaged in the literature on unequal representation. These findings delineate an intriguing research agenda on tensions between electoral and policymaking logics, and on the mechanisms leading to the marginalization of certain groups.