Tales of the unexpected: Promissory representation in times of uncertainty and economic downturn

Abstract

According to widely held views on good democratic practice, when political parties are in government, they should generally keep the promises they made to voters during the previous election campaigns that brought them to power. But what happens when things change dramatically between the times of promising and governing? We develop and test a theory of how economic uncertainty and change affects promise keeping. We argue that when parties formulate election pledges amid high levels of uncertainty, they make promises that can be kept even when significant negative economic changes transpire. We test the implications of the theory using a mixed methods approach, including a quantitative analysis of over 9000 election pledges made by parties from 13 countries. We also present new quantitative and qualitative evidence on pledge fulfillment by Australian parties, which offers a highly relevant test of the impact of unexpected events.