Campaign Promises Research Articles

Making Policies Matter: Voter Responses to Campaign Promises

Abstract Can voters in clientelist countries be swayed by programmatic promises? Results from a structural model and a field experiment disseminating candidate policy platforms in Philippine mayoral elections indicate that they can. Voters who received information about candidate policy promises were more likely to vote for candidates who were closer to their own preferences. Voters who were informed about incumbent candidates’ past commitments were more likely to vote for incumbents who fulfilled them. The structural model uncovers mechanisms. Information about campaign promises increases policies’ salience relative to other voter concerns; it also affects voter beliefs about candidate quality and candidates’ platforms.

Are Campaign Promises Effective?

Are Campaign Promises Effective?

Campaign Promises, Leadership Performance and Democratic Consolidation in Kwara State, 1999-2015: A Federation Unit in Nigeria

Campaign Promises, Leadership Performance and Democratic Consolidation in Kwara State, 1999-2015: A Federation Unit in Nigeria

Fulfilling Campaign Promises or Following Public Opinion: Does the Size of the Majority Matter?

AbstractWe perform a survey experiment on the issue of immigration. People are presented with a situation where public opinion is at odds with the election promise. In our control group, no information is given about public opinion. In the treatment groups, respondents are told that 55 per cent or 80 per cent of the people are against the project. When respondents are informed about the election promise but are not told about public opinion, 64 per cent say that the party should fulfill its promise. That percentage drops to 51 per cent when people are informed that a slight majority (55 per cent) are opposed to the project and to 42 per cent when they are told that a strong majority (80 per cent) are opposed. Citizens thus believe that politicians should pay attention not only to the majority view but also to the size of that majority.

Do Voters in Local Elections Prefer Campaign Promises About Attributable Policies?

Do Voters in Local Elections Prefer Campaign Promises About Attributable Policies?

Media Coverage of Campaign Promises Throughout the Electoral Cycle

ABSTRACT Previous studies conclude that governments fulfill a large share of their campaign pledges. However, only a minority of voters believe that politicians try to keep their promises, and many voters struggle to recall the fulfillment or breaking of salient campaign pledges accurately. I argue that this disparity between the public perception and empirical evidence is influenced by the information voters receive throughout the electoral cycle. I expect that the media extensively inform readers about political promises. In addition, I posit that news outlets focus more on broken than on fulfilled promises and that the focus on broken promises has increased over time. I find strong support for these expectations based on a new text corpus of over 430,000 statements on political commitments published between 1979 and 2017 in 22 newspapers during 33 electoral cycles in Australia, Canada, Ireland, and the United Kingdom. Newspapers inform voters regularly about announced, broken, and fulfilled promises. Yet, across the four countries, newspapers report at least twice as much on broken than on fulfilled promises. Moreover, this negativity bias in reports on political promises has increased substantively. The results have implications for studying campaign promises, negative information in mass media, and the linkages between voters and parties.

The Voters on the Hills: Campaign Promises Regarding Judea and Samaria and their Effect on the Voting Patterns of the Israeli Citizens in these Regions

The Voters on the Hills: Campaign Promises Regarding Judea and Samaria and their Effect on the Voting Patterns of the Israeli Citizens in these Regions

(Dis)Honest Politicians and the Value of Transparency for Campaign Promises

Promises are prevalent in many competitive environments, but promise keeping is often difficult to observe. Do promises still offer an opportunity to honor future obligations, if promise keeping is unobservable? Focusing on campaign promises, we study the value of transparency. We show how preferences for truth-telling shape promise competition when promise keeping can(not) be observed. We identify the causal effects of transparency in a laboratory experiment. Transparency leads to less generous promises, but also to less promise breaking. Nonetheless, officials appropriate similar rents as in opaque institutions. Preferences for truth-telling and (instrumental) reputational concerns explain these results.

La educación superior: promesas de campaña y ejercicio de gobierno

Desde hace algún tiempo emergió en México un consenso social favorable a la ampliación de las oportunidades educativas de tipo superior. Se trata no sólo de una aspiración legítima, sino de una vía para enfrentar las profundas y persistentes desigualdades sociales del país y un mecanismo fundamental para impulsar el desarrollo basado en el conocimiento. Quizá por eso la educación superior fue uno de los asuntos prioritarios a los que se refirió el actual Presidente Constitucional, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. En torno a este tema, formuló varias promesas de campaña con el fin de ganar la simpatía de los jóvenes y de otros grupos de la población. El cumplimiento de cada una de las promesas de campaña supone asumir una serie de decisiones clave. En este artículo reviso brevemente la evolución de largo plazo de las oportunidades educativas de tipo superior, y examino en este marco los alcances e implicaciones que se derivan del eventual cumplimiento (o no) de las promesas de López Obrador, al tiempo que pongo énfasis en la envergadura de los esfuerzos presupuestales que el país tendría que llevar a cabo para hacerlas realidad.

Believe It or Not? Partisanship, Preferences, and the Credibility of Campaign Promises

AbstractWe use a novel survey experiment with a broadly representative sample to reveal an important phenomenon in voter integration of campaign communications: preference-mediated partisan motivation. When evaluating the credibility of candidate position changes on minimum wage policy (a readily quantifiable and salient issue domain), partisans do not take a new stance at face value, apply universal skepticism, or simply afford more credibility to co-partisans. Instead, they process a candidate’s stance through an interaction between the voter’s partisan allegiance and their own policy preference. Partisans update more when a co-partisan moves closer to them than when the candidate shifts away from them. The opposite pattern emerges with the other party’s candidates: partisans tend to be more receptive if the candidate moves away from them. This feature of campaign message acceptance has profound implications for political communication and our understanding of partisan cognition.

Campaign Promises and HBCU Advocacy: When a promise is really a pitch (Editor’s Commentary)

Campaign Promises and HBCU Advocacy: When a promise is really a pitch (Editor’s Commentary)

Analysis of Library Related Campaign Promises of the Candidates for the Heads of Metropolitan Governments and the Superintendents of Education

Analysis of Library Related Campaign Promises of the Candidates for the Heads of Metropolitan Governments and the Superintendents of Education

Why Do or Do Not the Members of the National Assembly Carry Out Their Campaign Promises?

본 연구는 국회의원들의 공약이행에 미치는 정치적 요인을 알기 위해서 한국매니페스토 실천본부에서 조사한 제19대 국회의원의 공약이행 평가 자료를 기초로 개별 지역구 국회의원들의 공약이행률을 검토하고 국회의원 선거공약과 정당공약과의 일치율, 국회의원의 개인적 역량과 지역구 특성이 공약이행률에 미치는 효과를 회귀분석을 통해 분석했다. 그 결과 국회의원의 선거공약이 양대 정당(새누리당과 민주통합당) 공약에 모두 제시될수록 공약이행률이 높아진 것으로 나타났다. 반면에 국회의원의 선거공약이 새누리당이든 민주통합당이든 어떤 한 정당의 공약하고만 일치할 경우에는 공약이행률이 높아지지는 않았다. 이러한 결과는 제19대 국회에서 국회선진화법이 시행됨으로써 양대 정당 중 어느 한 당의 반대가 있다면 제도적으로 어떤 공약도 시행되기 어려운 현실을 반영한 것이며 유권자들과의 약속을 지키는 책임정치의 실현을 위해서는 정당 간의 정치적 합의가 중요하다는 것을 증명하고 있다.

How Donald Trump Can Keep His Campaign Promises, Grow the Economy, Cut Tax Rates, Repatriate Offshore Earnings, Reduce Income Inequality, Keep Jobs in the United States, Reduce the Deficit, and Save the World

This paper discusses President Trump's tax proposals and the House Republicans' Blueprint, and makes a number of suggestions that would allow President Trump to keep all of his tax policy campaign promises and some others.

Partially Revealing Campaign Promises

AbstractCandidates competing for political office give promises to voters. There are no legal restraints preventing incumbents from breaking their electoral promises. This paper models campaign promises as pure cheap talk and asks why is it influential. We propose that a candidate's campaign promises are a partially revealing signal of her policy preference type. The incumbent's policy choice is yet another signal of her type. Policy choice is a costly signal (unlike campaign promises). The incumbent keeps her electoral promises in order to preserve ambiguity about her type, which is necessary to assemble a winning majority for reelection. She keeps her promises regardless of information about the efficiency of different public policies which she receives upon taking office. Therefore, campaign promises generate inefficiencies in public policy.

Vote Buying or Campaign Promises? Electoral Strategies When Party Credibility Is Limited

What explains significant variation across countries in the use of vote buying instead of campaign promises to secure voter support? This paper explicitly models the tradeoff parties face between engaging in vote buying and making campaign promises, in a setting where the credibility of campaign promises can vary. We find that vote buying increases when party credibility is lower, when electoral accountability is stronger, and when incumbents have a vote buying advantage. Contrary to common assumptions, we show that vote buying need not always reflect rent seeking behavior. The model also provides insights into the distributional consequences of vote buying: when party credibility is sufficiently low, some voters targeted with vote buying receive no government transfers post-election.

Vote Buying or Campaign Promises? Electoral Strategies When Party Credibility is Limited

Vote Buying or Campaign Promises? Electoral Strategies When Party Credibility is Limited

Partially Binding Platforms: Campaign Promises vis-à-vis Cost of Betrayal

This study examines and models the effects of partially binding campaign platforms in a political competition. Here, a candidate who implements a policy that differs from the platform must pay a cost of betrayal, which increases with the size of the discrepancy. I also analyse endogenous decisions by citizens to run for an election. In particular, the model is able to show two implications that previous frameworks have had difficulty with. First, candidates with different characteristics have different probabilities of winning an election. Second, even knowing that he/she will lose an election, a candidate will still run, hoping to make an opponent's policy approach his/her own policy.

Avoiding Campaign Threats and Promises

Making unlawful threats and promises, usually without having any idea they are doing so, is one of the most common ways employers commit unfair labor practices during union organizing campaigns. One case that is instructive in this regard involved statements officials made at a meeting with employees (Auto Nation, Inc., 13‐CA‐06376, 7/9/2014).

Partially Binding Platforms: Campaign Promises Vis-a-Vis Cost of Betrayal

This paper examines the effects of campaign platforms in a political competition when campaign platforms are partially binding such that a candidate who implements a policy different from his/her platform must pay a cost of betrayal, which increases with the size of the discrepancy. I also analyze endogenous decisions by citizens to run for election. First, partially binding platforms can show an asymmetric electoral outcome and predict who wins. A candidate who is more moderate and less policy motivated, and whose cost of betrayal is higher than that of the opponent with the same degree of betrayal wins. Second, even though a candidate knows that he/she will lose, he/she enters the race to induce the opponent to approach the loser's ideal policy.