Election pledges, party competition, and policymaking

Comparative Politics

Volumn 39, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 311-329

  Mansergh, Lucy ^a   Thomson, Robert ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34248647297     PISSN: 00104159     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (70)

1. American Political Science Association, "Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System: A Report of the Committee on Political Parties," American Political Science Review, 44 (1950);
2. Carl J. Friedrich, Man and His Government: An Empirical Theory of Politics (New York: Me Graw-Hill, 1963).
3. Robert A. Dahl, Modern Political Analysis (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1991);
4. Hans-Dieter Klingemann, Richard I. Hofferbert, and Ian Budge, Parties, Policies and Democracy (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994);
5. Ian Budge and Kenneth Newton et al., The Politics of the New Europe: Atlantic to Urals (London: Longman, 1997).
6. Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper, 1957);
7. Efthalia Kalogeropoulou, "Parties and the Mandate: Pledge Fulfilment by Greek Governments 1974-1989" (Ph.D. diss., University of Essex, 1993), p. 6;
8. Klingemann, Hoffbert, and Budge, p. 31.
9. Brian Barry, Sociologists, Economists and Democracy (London: Macmillan, 1970);
10. David Robertson, A Theory of Party Competition (London: Wiley, 1976);
11. Ian Budge and Dennis Farlie, Voting and Party Competition: A Theoretical Critique and Synthesis Applied to Surveys from Ten Democracies (New York: Wiley, 1977);
12. Kirsten R. Monroe, ed., The Economic Approach to Politics: A Critical Reassessment of the Theory of Rational Action (New York: HarperCollins, 1991);
13. Bernard Grofman, ed., Information, Participation and Choice: An Economic Theory of Democracy in Perspective (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993).
14. William H. Riker, Liberalism against Populism: A Confrontation between the Theory of Democracy and the Theory of Social Choice (San Francisco: Freeman, 1982).
15. Gerald M. Pomper and Susan S. Lederman, Elections in America: Control and Influence in Democratic Politics, 2nd ed. (New York: Longman, 1980), pp. 219-23.
16. Michael Laver and W. Ben Hunt, Policy and Party Competition (New York: Routledge, 1992).
17. Samuel E. Finer, "Manifesto Moonshine," New Society, Nov. 13,1975, pp. 379-80;
18. J. Roland Pennock, Democratic Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 315-21;
19. David Held, Models of Democracy, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996).
20. Budge and Newton et al., pp. 261-63.
21. Held, pp. 191-98.
22. Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977);
23. Russell J. Dalton, "Cognitive Mobilization and Partisan Dealignment in Advanced Industrial Democracies," Journal of Politics, 46 (1984), 264-84;
24. Russell J. Dalton, Citizen Politics in Western Democracies: Public Opinion and Political Parties in the United States, Great Britain, West Germany and France (Chatham: Chatham House, 1988);
25. Milton Lodge, Marco R. Steenbergen, and Shawn Brau, "The Responsible Voter: Campaign Information and the Dynamics of Candidate Evaluation," American Political Science Review, 89 (1995), 309-26.
26. Klingemann, Hoffbert, and Budge; Matthew Gibbons, "Review: Parties, Policies, and Democracy," European Political Science, 3 (2004).
27. On the relationship between the enactment of election pledges and the saliency approach, see Terry J. Royed, Policy Promises and Policy Action in the United States and Great Britain, 1979-1988 (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1992);
28. Terry J. Royed, "Testing the Mandate Model in Britain and the United States: Evidence from the Reagan and Thatcher Eras," British Journal of Political Science, 26 (1996), 45-80;
29. Robert Thomson, The Party Mandate: Election Pledges and Government Actions in the Netherlands, 1986-1998 (Amsterdam: Thela Thesis, 1999).
30. Pomper and Lederman.
31. See Richard Rose, Do Parties Make a Difference? (London: Macmillan, 1984);
32. Colin Railings, "The Influence of Election Programs: Britain and Canada 1945-1979," in Ian Budge, David Robertson, and Derek Heart, eds., Ideology, Strategy and Party Change: Spatial Analysis of Post-War Election Programs in Nineteen Democracies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 1-15;
33. Railings; Kalogeropoulou, "Parties and the Mandate"; Efthalia Kalogeropoulou, "Election Promises and Government Performance in Greece: PASOK's Fulfillment of Its 1981 Election Pledges," European Journal of Political Research, 17 (1989), 289-311.
34. Michael Gallagher, Michael Laver, and Peter Mair, Representative Government in Modern Europe (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995), p. 347.
35. Thomson, The Party Mandate;
36. Robert Thomson "The Programme to Policy Linkage: The Fulfillment of Election Pledge on Socio-economic Policy in the Netherlands, 1986-1998," European Journal of Political Research, 40 (2001), 171-97.
37. Lucy E. Mansergh, "Do Parties Make a Difference? The Case of Governments in Ireland, 1977-1997" (Ph.D. diss., Trinity College Dublin, 2004).
38. Royed, "Testing the Mandate Model in Britain and the United States"; Thomson, The Party Mandate; Mansergh.
39. Mansergh, Royed, and Thomson report detailed procedures regarding their coding of election programs. They also report reliability tests. They compared their coding of documents with the coding of other researchers in terms of the number of pledges they both identified against the total number of pledges identified. The reliability test results were 84 percent in Royed, "Testing the Mandate Model in Britain and the United States," pp. 79-80, and 68 and 88 percent in Thomson, "The Party Mandate, p. 83. Mansergh conducted two intercoder reliability tests. One yielded an intercoder reliability of 68 percent, and the second one of 89 percent.
40. Rose, pp. 54-55.
41. Thomson, The Party Mandate, p. 105.
42. Rose, p. 54.
43. John Garry and Lucy E. Mansergh, "Party Manifestos," in Michael Marsh and Paul Mitchell, eds., How Ireland Voted 1997 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999), pp. 82-107.
44. For example, Finer, p. 379; Dennis Kavanagh, "The Politics of Manifestos," Parliamentary Affairs, 34 (1981), 7-27.
45. Ian Budge, Hans-Dieter Klingemann, Andrea Volkens, Judith Bara, and Eric Tanenbaum, Mapping Policy Preferences: Estimates for Parties, Electors, and Governments 1945-1998 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
46. Robert Thomson, "Election Pledges and Coalition Agreements in the Netherlands, 1986-1994," Acta Politica, 34 (1999), 302-30.
47. Pomper and Lederman, pp. 138-39.
48. Robertson; Klingemann, Hofferbert, and Budge.
49. Royed, "Testing the Mandate Model in Britain and the United States"; Rose.
50. For the Netherlands, see Thomson, The Party Mandate, p. 104.
51. Ibid., p. 110.
52. Gary King, Michael Laver, Richard I. Hofferbert, Ian Budge, and Michael McDonald, "Party Platforms, Mandates and Government Spending," American Political Science Review, 87 (1993), 744-50.
53. Eric C. Browne and John Dreijmanis, eds., Government Coalitions in Western Democracies (New York: Longman, 1982), pp. 349-50.
54. Robert L. Peterson and Martine M. De Ridder, "Government Formation as a Policy-Making Arena," Legislative Studies Quarterly, 11 (1986), 565-81.
55. Gregory M. Luebbert, Comparative Democracy: Policymaking and Governing Coalitions in Europe and Israel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
56. Ibid., p. 52.
57. The N under "supported in the government agreement" is 12, as opposed to 13 under "not supported in the government agreement," because the 1994 government agreement supported none of the pledges made by Fine Gael, despite Fine Gael's participation in the subsequent coalition. The figures in Table 2 were also calculated as percentages of the total number of pledges supported or not supported in the agreements that were at least partially enacted (rather than, as in Table 2, as average percentages across election programs). Pledges supported in the agreements were more likely to be enacted. However, the levels of pledge enactment were much lower. Of the 537 pledges made by prospective coalition parties that were not supported in the government agreements, 30 percent (160) were at least partially enacted. Of the 474 pledges made by prospective government parties that were supported in the government agreements, 39 percent (183) were at least partially enacted.
58. Thomson, The Party Mandate, p. 205.
59. Michael Laver and Kenneth A. Shepsle, eds., Cabinet Ministers and Parliamentary Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994);
60. Michael Laver and Kenneth A. Shepsle, Making and Breaking Governments: Cabinets and Legislatures in Parliamentary Democracies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
61. Laver and Shepsle, Making and Breaking, p. 42.
62. Laver and Shepsle, eds., p. 298.
63. Rudy B. Andeweg and Wilma Bakema, "The Netherlands: Ministers and Cabinet Policy," in Laver and Shepsle, eds., pp. 56-72.
64. These figures were also calculated in the same way as those in Table 2; the pledges made by each of the seven prospective governing parties were divided into those for which the party received the relevant ministerial portfolio and those for which it did not. Across the seven programs, the average percentage partially or fully enacted did not differ between these two groups. Thus it is important to include an analysis at the level of individual pledges (as in Table 3). Mansergh and Thomson also conducted multivariate tests using logistic regressions. Government agreements and allocations of ministerial portfolios both have a significant impact on the likelihood of pledge enactment after controlling for other variables.
65. Robertson; Ian Budge, David Robertson, and Derek J. Hearl, eds., Ideology, Strategy and Party Change: Spatial Analysis of Post-War Election Programs in Nineteen Democracies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
66. Klingemann, Hofferbert, and Budge, p. 25; Richard I. Hofferbert and Ian Budge, "The Party Mandate and the Westminster Model: Election Programs and Government Spending in Britain, 1948-1985," British Journal of Political Science, 22 (1992), 151-82.
67. Pomper and Lederman, p. 157.
68. Royed, "Testing the Mandate Model in Britain and the United States."
69. Richard S. Katz and Peter Mair, eds., How Parties Organize: Change and Adaptation in Party Organizations in Western Democracies (London: Sage, 1994).
70. The importance of campaign statements and media reports has been recognized in the saliency approach to the program-to-policy linkage. See Jan Kleinnijenhuis and Ewald M. Rietberg, "Parties, Media, the Public and the Economy: Patterns of Societal Agenda-setting," European Journal of Political Research, 28 (1995), 95-118.