When and Why Are Voters Correct in Their Evaluations of Specific Government Performance?
| Published date | 01 December 2017 |
| Date | 01 December 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0032321716688359 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321716688359
Political Studies
2017, Vol. 65(4) 860 –876
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321716688359
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When and Why Are Voters
Correct in Their Evaluations
of Specific Government
Performance?
Elin Naurin and Henrik Ekengren Oscarsson
Abstract
Democratic theories expect citizens to be able to accurately evaluate fulfilment of parties’ election
pledges. We use specifically designed survey items from the Swedish National Election Study to
compare citizens’ perceptions of the fulfilment of specific party pledges with actual fulfilment and
assess circumstances that lead to correct evaluations. We find that political knowledge triumphs
partisan attachments to incumbent parties when it comes to explaining why voters are correct. The
results are interesting in light of common knowledge about the importance of partisan attachment
in evaluations of general government performance: We argue that when specific election pledges
are being evaluated, personal heuristics, such as attachments to incumbent parties, play a lesser
role for judgements. Instead, the specificity embedded in the evaluation encourages citizens to
engage in a more knowledge-based evaluation of whether pledges are fulfilled or not.
Keywords
political representation, voters’ evaluation of government performance, election promises,
parties, Sweden
Accepted: 27 October 2016
In most theoretical models of political representation, mandate giving and accountability
are central mechanisms. Many hopes and promises of electoral democracy around the
world rest on the principle that democratically elected leaders rule with the consent of the
governed. The idea is that if elected representatives have not acted upon past election
promises, citizens will take the opportunity to vote them out of office at the next election.
The pledges that political parties make at elections therefore touch at the very core prin-
ciples of electoral democracy. Pledges serve as messages of intent for the future election
term communicated in the form of concrete derivations of the party’s ideological pro-
gramme, and they are at the same time crucial benchmarks for the evaluation of party
Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Göteborg, Sweden
Corresponding author:
Elin Naurin, Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Box 711, Göteborg 40530, Sweden.
Email: elin.naurin@pol.gu.se
688359PSX0010.1177/0032321716688359Political StudiesNaurin and Oscarsson
research-article2017
Article
Naurin and Oscarsson 861
performance since the previous election (Håkansson and Naurin, 2016; Mansbridge,
2003; Mansergh and Thomson, 2007; Przeworski et al., 1999; Royed, 1996).
However, holding parties accountable for pledge fulfilment is a highly demanding task
for citizens. If this mechanism of retrospective accountability for specific policies is to
work properly, citizens need to perceive, evaluate and act upon information both about
past party pledges and about actual policy performance, that is, whether the pledges made
at the last election have actually been fulfilled or not fulfilled. Given the fundamental role
of mandate giving and accountability in democratic theory and in popular models of
political representation, research should pay attention to when and why citizens accu-
rately evaluate election pledges, and when and why they do not.
This article compares citizens’ perceptions of the fulfilment of party pledges to the
actual fulfilment and analyses what factors encourage perceptual correctness. We focus
specifically on the importance of the individual’s political knowledge and attachment to
incumbent parties as well as on the importance of the pledge’s degree of specificity and
saliency in the campaign. We make a point of studying pledges where it is objectively
clear whether a pledge is fulfilled or not. In doing so, we take into account that citizens’
and scholar’s definitions of fulfilment sometimes differ (see Naurin, 2011). Data come
from the 2010 Swedish National Election Study (SNES) where specifically designed sur-
vey items on seven pledges made by the majority coalition government the Alliance for
Sweden are included.
Citizens’ Evaluation of Specific Government Performance
Typically, the literature on how citizens evaluate government performance concentrates
on citizens’ general evaluations, such as how the state of the economy is perceived
(Kiewiet, 1983; Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier, 2000; Powell and Whitten, 1993; Samuels
and Hellwig, 2010) or how well the welfare state functions (Kumlin and Stadelmann-
Steffen, 2014). Less attention has been dedicated to the type of evaluations that are the
focus of this article; citizen’s evaluations of specific government performance in the form
of fulfilment of particular election pledges. This imbalance in the empirical literature
does not correspond with commonly used theories of representative democracy, where
concepts like ‘mandate fulfilment’ (Pomper and Lederman, 1980; Rose, 1980; Royed,
1996) and ‘promissory representation’ (Mansbridge, 2003) highlight the importance of
citizens also in evaluating governments’ making and breaking of specific election pledges.
The work performed by scholars of election pledges informs us that the predictive
power of party pledges on future policy making is indeed sufficiently high to be valuable
information for voters in helping them make up their minds at elections (for recent examples,
see Artés, 2013; Artés and Bustos, 2008; Costello and Thomson, 2008; Kostadinova,
2013; Mansergh and Thomson, 2007; Moury, 2011; Naurin, 2014; Royed, 1996;
Schermann and Ennser-Jedenastik, 2014; Thomson, 2001). However, citizens do not, in
general, share this conviction. Instead, public opinion tends to hold pessimistic expecta-
tions as to the fulfilment of election pledges (Naurin, 2011; Thomson, 2011). When
governments’ average pledge fulfilment is evaluated (‘do they usually keep their prom-
ises?’), most citizens express inaccurate perceptions compared to scholars’ evaluations.
Previous research has demonstrated that citizens operate with different and often wider
definitions of election promises than the ones commonly used by the scholars who inves-
tigate pledge fulfilment (Naurin, 2011). To begin with, citizens should not be expected to
receive information on parties’ policy positions directly from election manifestos (see, for
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