Time and the Fulfillment of Election Pledges
| Published date | 01 February 2019 |
| Date | 01 February 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321718762882 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321718762882
Political Studies
2019, Vol. 67(1) 207 –223
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321718762882
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Time and the Fulfillment of
Election Pledges
Dominic Duval and Francois Pétry
Abstract
In this article, we highlight the importance of accounting for time in the study of pledge
fulfillment, effectively adding a significant element to the ongoing academic discussions of the
factors that influence the fulfillment of party promises. Unlike previous analyses in which pledge
fulfillment is assumed to be a uniform process occurring over time, we analyze party pledge
fulfillment using a discrete time approach: doing so highlights yet unobserved dynamics. More
precisely, we find that if the government does not enact pledges within the first half of its
mandate, the probability of these pledges ever being fulfilled drops drastically. The discrete time
modeling approach also allows us to investigate the relationships existing between the budget
balance and pledge fulfillment more thoroughly. Our research also extends the study of pledge
fulfillment to a new case, the province of Quebec, for the period of 1994–2014 encompassing
six governments. Finally, we also conduct similar analyses on Canadian pledge fulfillment data
spanning seven successive governments from 1993 to 2015. This study analyzes a total of 1431
manually coded election pledges.
Keywords
electoral pledges, party mandate, legislative behavior, representation, time
Accepted: 12 February 2018
Introduction
In this article, we highlight the importance of accounting for time in the study of pledge
fulfillment, effectively adding a significant element to the ongoing academic discussions
of the factors that influence the fulfillment of party promises. It is generally accepted that
government decision makers, constrained by limited attention and resources, must prior-
itize certain issues ahead of others (e.g. Baumgartner and Jones, 1993; Jones and
Baumgartner, 2005; Kingdon, 1984). This process occurs in cycles as policy-making is
not continuous but rather structured around decision points where the agendas are aggre-
gated and priorities are established (Bevan et al., 2011). One recurring key aggregation
Department of Political Science, Université Laval, Quebec City, QC, Canada
Corresponding author:
Dominic Duval, Department of Political Science, Université Laval, 2325, Rue de l’Université, Quebec City,
QC G1V 0A6, Canada.
Email: f.d.duval@gmail.com
762882PSX0010.1177/0032321718762882Political StudiesDuval and Pétry
research-article2018
Article
208 Political Studies 67(1)
moment is when party platforms are made public during election campaigns. Election
platforms are a key element in the establishment of policy priorities because they are the
transmission belt between party promises and subsequent government action. Bevan et al.
(2011) state as follows:
Transmission [between policy promises and statuses] is not perfect since legislative priorities
and outputs are susceptible to changes in public opinion or media coverage, unanticipated events
in the external world, backbench rebellions, changes in the political parties, and the practical
constraints of administering policies or programmes (Bevan et al., 2011: 395).
One approach in the promise-to-policy linkage literature looks at the congruence
between the emphases that parties place on different policy issues in their election plat-
forms and the number of programs enacted on those issues by the party that wins the
election (see, for example, Klingemann et al., 1994). Meanwhile, the approach subscribed
to in this article looks directly at the promise-to-policy linkage, one specific promise at a
time (Naurin, 2011; Pétry and Collette, 2009; Royed, 1996; Thomson et al., 2017).
Previous studies have considered the influence of time on the fulfillment of specific party
promises, either as a resource that works in favor of longer-lasting governments (Thomson
et al., 2017) or as a long-term trend through which parties appear to be making (and ful-
filling) ever larger numbers of election pledges (Håkansson and Naurin, 2016). But as far
as we know, no published study has ever documented the timing of the fulfillment of
specific pledges for the duration of a given government and correlated it with other deter-
minants of pledge fulfillment.
This study is innovative as it takes into account the moment at which individual
pledges become fulfilled during a mandate. The traditional methods of logistic and lin-
ear regression used in previous pledge fulfillment studies are not well suited to incorpo-
rate the timing of pledges. That is why we use a discrete time duration approach to
pledge fulfillment. This approach aims to discover whether and explain why some
pledges are more likely to be fulfilled than others during a government mandate. The
research question is not only whether or not a pledge has been fulfilled but also when the
fulfillment occurred. The discrete time approach that we use highlights yet unobserved
dynamics. More precisely, we see that if the government does not enact pledges quickly,
the probability of these pledges ever being fulfilled drops drastically. The drop in the
probability of pledge fulfillment after the first half of the mandate seems understandable
in view of the various institutional and political factors that may erode a government’s
policy-making capacity.
The discrete time approach also allows us to conduct a more detailed analysis
of the importance of a key explanatory variable in the pledge fulfillment litera-
ture: budget balance. Our research also extends the study of pledge fulfillment to
a new case, the province of Quebec, for the period of 1994–2014, a period which
encompasses six successive governments. We also conduct analyses of pledge
fulfillment by Canadian parties over seven successive governments from 1993 to
2015. This study analyzes a total of 1431 manually coded election pledges. The
rest of the article is organized as follows. First, we briefly cover the scientific
literature on pledge fulfillment and then discuss the importance of the timing of
election pledges, before moving onto the methods and data utilized in the study.
We then discuss the results and their implications before concluding with our
general remarks and takeaways.
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