Election Promises, Party Behaviour and Voter Perceptions

The focus of this book is the puzzling division between scholars and citizens concerning whether politicians keep their election promises. While scholars in political science often claim that parties tend to act on most of their election promises, citizens are presumed to hold the opposite view -- t [...]
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The focus of this book is the puzzling division between scholars and citizens concerning whether politicians keep their election promises. While scholars in political science often claim that parties tend to act on most of their election promises, citizens are presumed to hold the opposite view -- that parties usually break their promises. This 'Pledge Puzzle' guides Elin Naurin in her analysis of the often referred to, but not empirically investigated, 'conventional wisdom' about election promises. Naurin uses a wide range of methods and asks questions of importance for an understanding of representative democracy. She investigates whether parties keep their election promises and how widespread the image of the promise breaking politician is. She also explores what citizens class as a broken election promise, and whether parties will be called promise breakers no matter what they actually say and do.