Project description
Pledging to serve? Investigating how campaign promises shape political preferences
A key feature of representative democracy is an election or campaign promise known as a pledge. It is made by a candidate or political party and is based on important issues and policy themes. The EU-funded PLEDGEDEM project will shed light on the link between politicians and their campaigns, voters and the role of media. It will explore the importance of pledges for vote choice and accountability and aims to create a new research agenda that will redefine how scientists view the link between parties and voters. The project's work will lead to enhanced knowledge on how voters select parties and how they behave towards those that betray their trust.
Objective
Election pledges are supposedly a vital part of representative democracy. Yet we do not in fact know whether and how pledges matter for vote choice and accountability. This project thus asks: Do election pledges matter for voters’ democratic behavior and beliefs?
The role of pledges in citizens’ democratic behavior and beliefs is, surprisingly, virtually unexplored. This project’s ambition is therefore to create a new research agenda that redefines how political scientists think about the link between parties and voters. The project not only advances the research frontier by introducing a new, crucial phenomenon for political scientists to study; it also breaks new ground because it provides original theoretical and methodological tools for this new research agenda.
The key empirical contribution of this project is to collect two path-breaking datasets in the United States, France, and Norway that produce an unbiased estimate of voters’ awareness and use of pledges. The first consists of a set of innovative panel surveys with embedded conjoint experiments conducted both before and after national elections. The second dataset codes all pledges; whether or not they are broken; and how the mass media report on them.
This project is unique in its scientific ambition: It studies the core mechanism of representative democracy as it happens in real time, and does so in several countries. If successful, we will have much firmer knowledge about how voters select parties that best represent them and sanction those that betray their trust – and what this all implies for people’s trust in democracy.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
ERC-COG - Consolidator GrantHost institution
8000 Aarhus C
Denmark