Trust and Citizens’ Evaluations of Promise Keeping by Governing Parties
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321718764177 |
| Author | Robert Thomson,Heinz Brandenburg |
| Date | 01 February 2019 |
| Published date | 01 February 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
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Article
Political Studies
2019, Vol. 67(1) 249 –266
Trust and Citizens’
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Keeping by Governing Parties
Robert Thomson1 and Heinz Brandenburg2
Abstract
The principle that parties should make policy commitments during election campaigns and fulfil
those commitments if elected is central to the idea of promissory representation. This study
examines citizens’ evaluations of promise keeping and breaking. We focus on two aspects of trust
as explanations of citizens’ evaluations. When trust is defined in terms of mistrust, it implies that
vigilant and well-informed citizens base their evaluations on what governments deliver. When
trust is defined in terms of distrust, it implies that citizens use heuristic thinking when evaluating
governing parties’ performance, regardless of what those parties do. Our evidence is from a
survey experiment in the British Election Study, which asked respondents to evaluate whether
governing parties fulfilled specific election pledges made during the previous election campaign.
The findings indicate that both mistrust and distrust affect citizens’ evaluations.
Keywords
election pledges, public opinion, trust, political knowledge
Accepted: 2 February 2018
To what extent are citizens able to distinguish between fulfilled and unfulfilled election
pledges? What explains variation in the extent to which citizens are able to do so accu-
rately? The answers to these questions are central to the idea of promissory representation
(Mansbridge, 2003: 515), which is found in the responsible party model and the mandate
theory of democracy (Downs, 1957; Grossback et al., 2005; Klingemann et al., 1994;
McDonald and Budge, 2005). Promissory representation holds that parties make commit-
ments during election campaigns and attempt to follow through on those commitments if
they enter government after elections. Citizens’ capacity to respond accurately to policy
performance is as vital as parties’ behaviour to ensuring a strong democratic chain of
command and control. Without such a capacity on the part of citizens, the responsible
party model would fail. For V.O. Key (1966), the responsible electorate, which rewards
1School of Social Sciences, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
2University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK
Corresponding author:
Robert Thomson, School of Social Sciences, Monash University, Melbourne, 3800 VIC, Australia.
Email: robert.thomson@monash.edu
250
Political Studies 67(1)
and punishes parties according to those parties’ performance in government, is the coun-
terpart to responsible parties. If voters are to respond in this way, they must be able to
distinguish accurately between promises that were kept and those that were broken.
Existing research on election pledges mainly describes and explains variation in
actual fulfilment, rather than citizens’ evaluations of fulfilment. The findings suggest a
puzzle that we address. Generally speaking, well above 50% of pledges are fulfilled at
least partially, and for some single-party governments, the figure is above 80% (Pomper
and Lederman, 1980; Rallings, 1987; Royed, 1996; Thomson et al., 2017). However, in
most countries, the majority of citizens believe that parties break their promises. In the
single-party governments that are typical of the United Kingdom, researchers typically
find that above 70% of election pledges are fulfilled (Rallings, 1987; Royed, 1996). By
contrast, only a minority of UK respondents agree with the statement ‘People we elect
as MPs try to keep the promises they have made during the election’ (ISSP Research
Group, 2008).1
Few studies have addressed this puzzle to date. Through in-depth interviews with
Swedish citizens, Naurin (2011) found that citizens generally hold a broad and amor-
phous understanding of pledges. By contrast, published research on pledge fulfilment is
based on clear definitions of election pledges that distinguish these statements from cam-
paign rhetoric. Thomson’s (2011) study of citizens’ evaluations of pledge fulfilment in
Ireland and Naurin and Oscarsson’s (2017) study of Sweden incorporated this insight.
Rather than ask citizens general questions about the fulfilment of pledges, which allow
respondents to define pledges as they will, they asked citizens to assess the fulfilment of
specific pledges that had been made in a previous election campaign. The headline find-
ings were that citizens are able to distinguish between pledges that were in fact fulfilled
or unfulfilled, and that their evaluations are also shaped by a range of individual-level
characteristics. Given the scarcity of research on this important topic for representative
democracy, the new data we present on British citizens’ evaluations of pledge fulfilment
are welcome.
We examine whether citizens’ trust in governing parties affects their evaluations of the
extent to which parties keep their promises. Following Lenard’s (2008) distinction
between the concepts of mistrust and distrust, we argue that distinct aspects of trust refer
first to a knowledge-based and vigilant responsiveness to actual government performance
and, second, to a heuristic based on a general expectation about performance, which is at
most weakly related to actual performance. Lenard (2008) defines mistrust as a healthy
vigilance, which implies that mistrustful citizens are well informed and able to identify
fulfilled pledges as fulfilled and unfulfilled pledges as unfulfilled. Following this line of
reasoning, we examine and find evidence of an interaction between actual pledge fulfil-
ment, citizens’ knowledge about politics and citizens’ evaluations of pledge fulfilment.
Actual performance, in terms of whether parties actually fulfilled their pledges, has the
strongest effect on the evaluations of the most knowledgeable citizens, although it also
impacts on the evaluations of the less knowledgeable.
Distrust, by contrast, equates with cynicism and the expectation of betrayal and disap-
pointment. Distrust is a negative heuristic that people use to inform their evaluations,
which accords with recent research that treats trust as a heuristic (Hetherington, 2004;
Rudolph and Evans, 2005). We use a survey experiment in the 2014–2017 British Election
Study (BES), which alters the salience of heuristic thinking based on citizens’ pre-exist-
ing levels of distrust (Fieldhouse et al., 2015). When the salience of distrust-based heuris-
tic thinking is raised (lowered), respondents’ pre-existing levels of distrust have a stronger
Thomson and Brandenburg
251
(weaker) effect on their evaluations of pledge fulfilment. We discuss how our research
design and findings shed light on the intricate ways in which distinct aspects of trust
impact on citizens’ evaluations.
Two Aspects of Trust: The Effects of Healthy Vigilance and
Heuristic Thinking on Citizens’ Evaluations
The dependent variable is citizens’ evaluations of the fulfilment of specific election
pledges. If citizens have a healthy mistrust of governing parties, which makes them atten-
tive to government performance when forming their assessments, then whether or not the
pledge was in fact fulfilled will be one of the most important factors shaping their evalu-
ations. Lenard (2008) argues that one component of trust, or rather the lack of trust, is
mistrust, which implies a healthy vigilance on the part of citizens regarding the use and
abuse of power by leaders. This idea is also found in the argument that democracy thrives
best when citizens are not overly trusting of their leaders (see Maloy, 2009 for a review).
This compels leaders to behave appropriately and enables citizens to detect poor perfor-
mance when it occurs.
Actual policy performance in our study refers to whether or not the election pledge
was in fact fulfilled. Pledges are campaign statements that are specific enough for people
to make reasonably objective assessments of pledge fulfilment. For example, one of the
pledges we examine is a statement in the 2010 Liberal Democrats’ manifesto to raise the
tax-free allowance on income to £10,000 in the 2011 tax year. The tax-free allowance was
indeed raised to £10,000 within the governing period following the 2010 election,
although not in 2011, as stated in the pledge, making it a partially fulfilled pledge.
Citizens’ information resources are relevant to their evaluations of pledge fulfilment,
and in particular to the extent to which their evaluations are affected by actual perfor-
mance. People who are more knowledgeable about politics hold a greater amount and
higher quality of factual information about politics and are better able to identify the rel-
evance of new information. They are able to identify the relevance of current policy
developments to parties’ previous pledges. This implies that citizens with greater political
knowledge make more accurate evaluations of pledge fulfilment. Similarly, Zaller’s
(1992) model of opinion formation posits that citizens with greater political awareness
are more inclined to absorb new information about politics and policies.
Existing research on citizens’ information resources arrives at different conclusions
regarding their ability to incorporate...
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