An exploration of whether politicians are perceived to keep their election promises. While scholars claim that parties act on most of their election promises, citizens hold the opposite view. This 'Pledge Puzzle' guides Naurin in her analysis of the often referred to but not empirically investigated, 'conventional wisdom' about election promises.
"Campaign promises are a critical component to conceptions of democratic representation. Candidates make promises, voters (prospectively) use those promises to choose candidates, and then evaluate them (retrospectively) based on those promises. Most research dedicated to understanding campaign promises focuses on promise fulfillment. Other research considers how candidate positions on various policies influence voter decision-making but ignores candidate commitment to those issues. I argue that understanding how campaign promises function during campaigns is an important missing piece to our understanding of representation. In context of campaigns, I offer an important conceptual clarification to the theory of promises by defining promises operationally as policy statements that indicate an action the candidate intends to carry out if elected. Thus, policy statements can be issued without promising, indicating a candidate's stance on an issue. This critical distinction, I argue, leads to several important contributions to our understanding for how promises matter to voters both prospectively and retrospectively that I test observationally and experimentally throughout the book. I develop a theoretical framework to examine how the conceptual distinction in campaign promises might matter by rigorously defining promises and giving context to what we already understand about promises. I argue that promising increases a candidate's appeared commitment on an issue. Because campaign promises serve as a signal for what candidates will do if elected, by increasing commitment to an issue, candidates are sending a stronger signal about their intended actions in office. Because voters disapprove of candidates who act out of step with their policy platforms, there can be relative confidence that an increased commitment to a position does not come without consequence, thus cementing promises as a strong signal of commitment. It follows then that this stronger signal will be preferred by individuals who hold the same position on the issue, and will more strongly repulse individuals who disagree with the candidate. The result of this argument is that promises polarize voter opinions of candidates"--
How does a candidate's rhetoric affect a voter's understanding of the candidate's position? Campaign promises, specifically, seem like they would affect voter opinion differently than position statements made without a promise. This dissertation develops a theory of how promises affect voter opinions of candidates with regard to non-promise position statements. Specifically, I argue that promises serve as commitments to voters of an action the candidate will take on a specific issue when in office. By increasing their perceived commitment to an issue, promises alter voter opinions both prospectively and retrospectively. Through a descriptive study of promise-making throughout the televised, presidential election debates, I show that there is a distinction between promises and non-promise position-taking in actual campaigns. I then present data from several survey experiments that demonstrate that promises have an impact on voter evaluations of candidates, and how they affect voter opinions. Ultimately, this dissertation points to the importance of understanding political rhetoric in position-taking.
The first book to examine voter behavior from both psychological and marketing perspectives, A Theory of Political Choice Behavior provides the tools politicians need to understand today's voter. It puts forth a comprehensive theory of voting behavior and empirically tests it on four recent elections; its prediction rate is as high as 95 percent in some cases. Section A examines the need to understand voter behavior and analyzes the traditional methods researchers have used in the past; Section B puts forth the author's new theory; Section C tests that theory; and Section D describes its implications for the present and the future. A tested recipe book for public policymakers as well as candidates, their media people, and their campaign strategists on all levels, this volume also includes sample surveys which pollsters can use to design their own polls.
This dissertation builds on previous works on voting behavior by focusing explicitly on how partisanship affects both perceptions of candidates and subsequent vote choices. I argue that there are two major ways in which partisanship affects the behavior of individuals: (1) partisanship biases citizens' perceptions of proximity which may subsequently alter proximity voting calculations; and (2) partisanship directly interacts with proximity to moderate its significance in the voting decision. Using both survey and experimental data, I place both voters and candidates on the same ideological scale and overcome a major obstacle confronting many other studies of this type. First, I show that even when presented with the same campaign messages, individuals do place candidates from their own party closer to their own positions and candidates from the opposite party farther from their own positions. Second, I present results that suggest that, at least among Republicans, individuals see less variation between candidates of their own party. Lastly, I show the effects of relative proximity are mitigated by both partisanship and incumbency, though the latter appears connected to the partisan tide of the election. Together, these results offer new insight into the puzzle of why Downsian logic does not always explain American electoral outcomes.
Voters do not always choose their preferred candidate on election day. Often they cast their ballots to prevent a particular outcome, as when their own preferred candidate has no hope of winning and they want to prevent another, undesirable candidate’s victory; or, they vote to promote a single-party majority in parliamentary systems, when their own candidate is from a party that has no hope of winning. In their thought-provoking book The Many Faces of Strategic Voting, Laura B. Stephenson, John H. Aldrich, and André Blais first provide a conceptual framework for understanding why people vote strategically, and what the differences are between sincere and strategic voting behaviors. Expert contributors then explore the many facets of strategic voting through case studies in Great Britain, Spain, Canada, Japan, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, and the European Union.
