The Fulfilment of Election Pledges in India

Abstract

The central idea of promissory representation is that parties make promises to voters during election campaigns and then fulfil those promises after elections if they have the power to do so. Until now, most comparative research on the making, breaking, and keeping of parties’ campaign promises, or “election pledges,” has considered Western democracies. The present study examines pledge fulfilment in India, focusing on pledges made by the two main Indian parties, the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Indian National Congress at the 2009 and 2014 national parliamentary elections. The evidence indicates that election pledges are prominent parts of electoral discourse and policymaking in India, as they are in Western countries. However, the form of pledge making and keeping is characterised by the distinctive features of Indian politics, notably the prevalence of valence politics on socio-economic issues and identity politics on issues relating to religion, castes and tribes, and gender.

Key Words:

• election pledges
• identity politics
• India
• political parties
• promissory representation

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Dharmalingam Arunachalam, Matteo Bonotti, Shishir Jha and Peter Lentini for their advice and constructive criticism. We thank the journal editor, Kevin Hewison, and anonymous referees for their thoughtful guidance throughout the review process.

Notes

1 One of the earliest studies to examine election pledges systematically was conducted by Pomper and Lederman (1980). For an alternative approach to examining the programme-to-policy linkage, which focuses on parties’ thematic emphases and subsequent spending patterns, see Klingemann, Hofferbert, and Budge (1994).

2 A companion article to the present one focuses on the making of election pledges by the two main Indian parties in the period 1999–2019 (Adhikari, Mariam, and Thomson 2022), as distinct from the present article’s focus on the fulfilment of pledges in the period 2009–2019.

3 Throughout the text, the quotes referring to parties’ pledges are taken from the parties’ official election manifestos.

4 For a review of identity politics, see Bernstein (2005).

5 The level of agreement between each of the initial lists of pledges of the coders was calculated as the number of pledges both coders (in each pair) identified as pledges as a percentage of the total number of pledges identified by both coders. The average agreement of 71% among these initial lists of pledges is similar to the intercoder reliability scores reported by Thomson et al. (2017).

6 Comparative research indicates that incumbent parties that are re-elected are significantly more likely to fulfil their election pledges than are opposition parties that enter government, particularly opposition parties without recent governing experience. In addition, pledges from manifestos that contain large numbers of pledges are somewhat less likely to be fulfilled. This second relationship between the frequency of pledges and the likelihood of fulfilment is not statistically significant in most models, however (Naurin, Royed, and Thomson 2019; Thomson et al. 2017).

7 A partial exception to this is arguably the BJP’s 2014 pledge to end “manual scavenging,” a refuse collection practice that is mainly carried out by Dalits. We assessed this outcome pledge as unfulfilled, as a report from 2020 estimated conservatively that there were 48,687 manual scavengers (National Safai Karamcharis Finance and Development Corporation 2020).

Additional information

Funding

Thomson acknowledges support from the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation, Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, project grant number MXM19-1137:1.