Periodic Reporting for period 3 - PLEDGEDEM (Pledges in democracy)
Período documentado: 2022-08-01 hasta 2024-01-31
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 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.
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 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.
The main work so far has been the implementation of a very large survey in the United States in the run-up to the 2020 Presidential election as well as the collection and coding of a huge number of tweets and news media articles. The coding is now finished and we have entered the analysis phase. Based on these results, the project will expand its empirical scope to other western democracies.
The US survey is unique in its scale and ambition. With it becomes possible to answer questions about democratic responsiveness in the context of pledge-making which until now have been impossible to answer.
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.
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.