Citizens’ awareness of electoral campaign pledges

Abstract

The theory of promissory representation (Mansbridge, 2003) proposes that voters select parties based on the pledges they made during the campaign. The elected parties then fulfill their promises and at the next election, voters reward or sanction the parties based on their pledge-fulfillment record. However, a fundamental assumption of promissory representation remains to be tested. If voters use party pledges to decide which party to vote for, they need to know which party made which pledges. To test the degree of awareness of citizens to party pledges, (a factor we dub pledge awareness), we included a module in the 2019 Canadian Election Study (CES) that tasks citizens to associate correctly six pledges found in the different electoral platforms with their respective parties. We find that while citizens may not know all six pledges included in our study, nonetheless, the most frequently selected answers to our pledge awareness questions are the correct ones. We also find that party identification and the information resources at the disposal of citizens play a large role in the citizen’s capacity to succeed at this matching task. Our study indicates that respondents tend to be more aware of the pledges made by the party they identify with, and well-informed respondents are more aware of pledges made by the other parties.