How Politicians View Promise-Keeping and Breaking: A Comparative Analysis

Promise-making and keeping are core elements of democratic theory. The degree to which promissory representation empirically holds has so far been assessed by country-specific and comparative analyses of the rate of fulfilment of political parties’ electoral campaign promises during the following parliamentary terms (Thomson et al. 2017; Naurin et al. 2019). Work examining citizens’ evaluations of promise keeping and breaking has also developed (Thomson 2011; Naurin and Oscarsson 2017), most recently using survey experiments (Thomson and Brandenburg 2019; Werner 2018; 2019; Werner and Heinisch and Werner 2022). This line of study had been preceded by in-depth interviews with voters on how the latter understand and evaluate pledges (Naurin 2011). In this paper we focus on an important missing piece in this research program, the view of politicians themselves. Based on in-depth interviews and survey data recently collected in the context of the POLEVPOP international project (Walgrave 2022-2027), we explore whether MPs in Australia, Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland consider that electoral promises may sometimes be broken, and the conditions under which such promise-breaking would be acceptable to them. In addition to confronting politicians’ responses to broad normative views on promise keeping, our comparative setup allows us to show that institutions (single party vs coalition systems; federal vs unitary states) matter a great deal for promise making and the conditions under which these pledges could be broken.