Governing together in good and bad economic times: the fulfilment of election pledges in Ireland

ABSTRACT

The idea that parties make promises to voters during election campaigns and then attempt to fulfil those promises if elected to government is central to the theory and practice of democracy. This study examines how economic conditions affect the fulfilment of parties’ election pledges in Ireland. We formulate and test propositions relating to two aspects of economic conditions that negatively affect the likelihood of pledge fulfilment. The first is that parties do not adjust pledges to prevailing economic conditions, and the second is that they do not accurately anticipate future economic conditions. We test these expectations with evidence on the fulfilment of 3681 pledges made by Irish parties in the period 1977–2011, which is one of the largest country-specific datasets on pledge fulfilment currently available. Given the considerable variation in economic conditions faced by Irish governments in this time period, these cases offer a particularly powerful test of the impact of economic conditions on pledge fulfilment.

KEYWORDS:

• Election pledges
• representation
• parties
• mandate

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the reviewers and editors of Irish Political Studies for the constructive criticism we received during the review process. We thank all members of the Comparative Party Pledge Group for comments on an earlier versions of our work: particularly Elin Naurin, Terry Royed, Joaquín Artés, Mark Ferguson, Petia Kostadinova, Catherine Moury. We thank Lucy Mansergh and Edwina Lowe for assembling and sharing most of the data we examine in this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The politician in question later said that what he meant was that parties do not explain to voters that their promises are dependent on economic circumstances (Reilly, 2013).

2 Laver and Shepsle's model also refers specifically to the government agreement between the coalition partners. We do not include a separate variable in the analyses for the coalition agreement since there is reason to believe this is endogenous to some of the other explanatory variables, notably the allocation of ministerial portfolios and agreement among parties.

3 The analysis integrates data from two previous studies (Mansergh, 2004; Costello & Thomson, 2008), as well as new data from the 2007–11 period. The data from the 2002 manifestos include socioeconomic pledges only, which make up approximately half of all pledges made. There is no significant difference between the rates of fulfilment of socioeconomic pledges and other pledges.

4 Excludes pledges from 2002.

5 FÁS Annual Report 2003; Dáil Debates 623: 1596, 6 July 2006.

6 We also applied multinomial models with a three-category dependent variable. The results were substantively the same, but we prefer the logistic regression since the results are more readily interpretable.