Do Top Politicians Really Take the ‘High Road’? Attitudes Towards Pledge-Breaking Across Political Elites in Australia

Promise-making and keeping are core elements of democratic theory. Whilst a rich comparative literature quantifying the rate of fulfilment of pre-electoral party pledges has developed, research on how citizens evaluate promise keeping and breaking has emerged more recently. Importantly, despite these being crucial aspects of their electoral mandate and hopes for re-election, the view of politicians themselves is a key missing piece in this research program. In this paper we aim to fill this gap. We further innovate by studying how top politicians (ministers and party leaders) differ from regular MPs in their views on promise-making and breaking. Based on in-depth interviews and survey data recently collected in Australia in the context of the POLEVPOP project, we investigate whether top politicians, who play a crucial role in the delivery of policy and in shaping democracy in their country, more often take ‘the high road’ in their normative views on promise-keeping. In particular, we assess whether political elites differ in the conditions under which pledges can be broken, in the values and principles they invoke when referring to pledge-keeping, and in the potential consequences of pledge-breaking. Our rich qualitative material allows us to provide, for the first time, an in-depth analysis of the distinctiveness of the small circle of high-level policy makers in our sample of national politicians, and to reflect further on their role in shaping democracy in their country.