Do Party Manifestos Matter in Policy-Making? Capacities, Incentives and Outcomes of Electoral Programmes in France
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321717745433 |
| Date | 01 November 2018 |
| Published date | 01 November 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
745433PSX0010.1177/0032321717745433Political StudiesBrouard et al.
research-article2018
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Political Studies
2018, Vol. 66(4) 903 –921
Do Party Manifestos Matter
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Incentives and Outcomes
of Electoral Programmes
in France
Sylvain Brouard1, Emiliano Grossman2 ,
Isabelle Guinaudeau3, Simon Persico4
and Caterina Froio5
Abstract
A key factor in modern democracies’ legitimisation is the extent to which policies submitted for
public approval before an election translate into material outcomes once a political party has won
power. Current research finds no clear empirical evidence for partisanship in policy-making nor
has any unified theory been offered or tested systematically. This article addresses that gap by
offering a conditional approach to policy-making undertaken by parties in government. It suggests
that partisan influence on policy depends on both office-holders’ capacity for implementing
policies evoked during their electoral campaigns and on governing parties’ incentives to implement
electoral promises. Data from French Agendas Project datasets is used to compare the contents
of governing parties’ pre-election manifestos with legislation passed in France between 1981 and
2012. Panel negative binomial regressions on electoral and legislative agendas support the expected
outcome, namely that issues featuring in governing parties’ electoral manifesto have had an impact
on their subsequent legislative agendas, with the effect depending on both partisan capacities and
incentives. Party programmes do matter in policy-making, albeit only under certain conditions.
Keywords
party mandate, governing party, policy agendas, legislation, issue attention
Accepted: 23 October 2017
A key factor in modern democracies’ legitimisation is the extent to which policies submit-
ted for public approval before an election translate into material outcomes once a political
party has won power. Political parties and their candidates are expected to aggregate sets
1CEVIPOF, Sciences Po, Paris, France
2Centre d’Études Européennes, Sciences Po, Paris, France
3Centre Emile Durkheim, Sciences Po Bordeaux, Pessac, France
4Pacte, Sciences Po Grenoble, France
5Sciences Po, Paris, France
Corresponding author:
Emiliano Grossman, Centre d’Études Européennes, Sciences Po, 28, rue des Saints-Pères, Paris 75007, France.
Email: emiliano.grossman@sciencespo.fr
904
Political Studies 66(4)
of policy positions and commit to implementing them as policies. Yet, the ability of any
political system to achieve elected representatives’ normative goals, or even popular sov-
ereignty, may be undermined if the “programme-to-policy linkage” (Thomson, 2001) is
too weak. This concern is not new. However, having become one of political science’s
most researched topics, the problem is that empirical evidence in the field is at best
contradictory.
The most influential approaches to public policy accord political parties and elections
a role that is at best marginal (John, 2012). Policies change slowly if at all (Lindblom,
1959; Pierson, 2000) in the face of all the problems that constantly emerge (Adler and
Wilkerson, 2013; Wildavsky, 1964). In the main, there is little room for mandate fulfill-
ment, given policymakers’ cognitive limits and institutional friction (Baumgartner and
Jones, 2005) and the presence of networks of experts, bureaucrats, interest groups and
citizen organisations (Marsh and Rhodes, 1992). Current literature moreover suggests
that governments’ room to manoeuver is vanishing (Boix, 2000) due to growing interde-
pendence (Keohane and Nye, 1989), international capital mobility (Frieden and Rogowski,
1996) and demographic dynamics (Castles, 2004; Häusermann, 2010).
These challenges to the party-mandate conception of democracy have triggered an
extensive literature investigating the nature of the “programme-to-policy linkages”. The
debate has long revolved around the question of whether parties actually matter. Analyses
have generated mixed findings. Some observed left-right differences with regards to
budget increases (Blais et al., 1993; Cameron, 1978), government employment (Cusack
et al., 1989), macro-economic intervention (Boix, 2000; Hibbs, 1977) and redistributive
policies (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Huber et al., 1993). Others revealed unexpected effects,
such as leftwing parties who deregulate and restrain spending (cf. Armingeon et al., 2016;
Baumgartner et al., 2009; Häusermann, 2010). This ambivalence is confirmed by meta-
analyses (Burstein and Linton, 2002; Imbeau et al., 2001).
Research on party manifestoes has attempted to assess the implementation of party
mandates through a more granular operationalisation. The assumption that political par-
ties represent stable interests and positions, common to much earlier literature, seems
fragile given the changing nature of party constituencies and electoral strategies’ influ-
ence on policy direction (see Häusermann et al., 2013 for a review). Analyses of party
manifestos and government spending priorities have found a strong relationship between
the two (Budge and Hofferbert, 1990; Klingemann et al., 1994). This research strand has,
however, been criticised for the limitations of its coding scheme, one more adapted for
analysis of party positions rather than policy outputs (Guinaudeau, 2014: 268). Moreover,
attention to an issue does not necessarily imply greater spending.
The present article argues that evicting party programmes from policy studies, alto-
gether creates a risk of missing one possible determinant of policy decisions, namely
elected officials’ incentive to commit to at least some electoral pledges since their party
is going to have to communicate about policy enactment in order to get re-elected in the
future. Faced with contrasting findings in the “do-parties-matter” literature and the
empirical observation that many if not all pledges are in fact fulfilled, we show that a
conditional approach seems better suited to understanding at what juncture party plat-
forms actually matter (cf. Schmidt, 1996).
The present paper introduces a comprehensive model drawing on insights from the
different aforementioned strands of literature. Its model acknowledges public policy lit-
erature’s depiction of considerable constraints, associating this with the hypothesis that
partisan influence depends on parties’ capacity for getting their policies on the agenda. It
Brouard et al.
905
remains that political party literature shows that office-holders are strategic agents seek-
ing to optimise scarce resources to attract votes, take office and adopt policy – inferring
that their influence also depends on the incentives they have to act on the issues high-
lighted during their electoral campaigns. We test our framework using extensive data on
parties and policy-making in France.
The following section develops this conditional approach to partisan government.
Subsequently, we present data and methods before analysing and discussing the findings
in conclusion.
Capacities and Incentives: A Conditional Mandate
Connection Between Programmes and Policies?
We combine different lessons from public policy and party politics literatures to develop
testable hypotheses about conditions facilitating partisan influence. Public policy litera-
ture has shown that parties in office have relatively little leeway for triggering policy
change. Government parties are unable to deal with the complete range of issues that arise
during their campaigns. Having said that, literature on party politics claims that parties
and their elected officials are generally strategic agents aware of the trade-offs between
policy aims, getting re-elected and winning votes (Müller and Strøm, 1999). Incumbent
parties usually seek re-election and must convey an attractive political vision while com-
municating about the policies enacted during their time in power. In turn, this creates
incentives to implement partisan policies – and, in particular, to fulfill a fair proportion of
all the campaign promises made.
Given the restrictions on governing parties’ room to manoeuver, they sometimes focus
their efforts in those areas where they can expect the greatest electoral pay-off. In this
case, the promised policy might be implemented at whatever point in the cycle is most
favourable. The model proposed in this article therefore assumes that programme-to-
policy linkages are most likely when parties have the ability (capacity) and/or encourage-
ment (incentives) to be partisan in their policy-making.
Capacity
Literature contesting the concept of partisan influence mainly argues that governments
lack the capacity to truly shape policy. This dimension, referring to the resources and
constraints that define a governing party’s room to manoeuver, is often considered the
only one that defines a conditional model of partisan influence on policy-making. A party
can be expected to keep its promises if and only if it enjoys sufficient institutional power
to implement them (Schmidt, 1996; Thomson et al., 2017). Moreover, the more complex
decision-making becomes, the less governing parties have the capacity to set an agenda
and enact policy (Tsebelis, 2002). The institutional component of capacity having been
established, the present model...
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