Abstract
Despite the substantive findings of existing research, the electoral mandate is still an elusive category in representation theory and empirical political science. The article offers a conceptual framework that promises to properly evaluate mandate fulfillment in general, and pledge fulfillment in particular from the standpoint of the normative theory of representation. In this framework the non-fulfillment of pledges is not necessarily bad for representation since mandate slippage , or the gradual process of abandoning the mandate in the post-election phase, may come in both bad and good forms. The proposed framework also develops an empirical research agenda for measuring the causes of bad mandates and mandate slippage by relying and expanding on the toolkit of empirical pledge research. Outcome oriented pledges serve as a prime example of bad mandates, whereas agency shirking is a major cause of bad mandate slippage.
Highlights
Despite the substantive findings of existing research, the electoral mandate is still an elusive category in representation theory and empirical political science.1 It was not so long ago that Andreas Schedler (1998: 191-192) contended that the ‘mandate theory of elections (...) has not commanded too much attention from political science’
The concept of the electoral mandate has been the subject of interpretations and redefinitions by politicians and political scientists alike
Despite its purely empiricist inclination, the literature on pledge fulfillment still serves as the best choice available for making empirical sense of, or measure, mandate slippage
Summary
Despite the substantive findings of existing research, the electoral mandate is still an elusive category in representation theory and empirical political science. It was not so long ago that Andreas Schedler (1998: 191-192) contended that the ‘mandate theory of elections (...) has not commanded too much attention from political science’. One way to operationalize the complexities of electoral mandates for empirical research is to look at explicit promises made during the campaigns Studies following this approach create their databases by extracting relevant information from party manifestos and other electoral communications. The present article offers a conceptual framework that promises to properly evaluate mandate fulfillment in general, and pledge fulfillment in particular from the standpoint of the normative theory of representation. In this framework the nonfulfillment of pledges is not necessarily bad for representation since mandate slippage, or the gradual process of abandoning the mandate in the post-election phase, may come in both bad and good forms.
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