Lies, damned lies, and political campaigns

Callander, Steven; Wilkie, Simon

doi:10.1016/j.geb.2006.12.003

Cited by 142 publications

(116 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…Such 'over pledging' is rational if parties place greater value on short-term electoral gains than on any potential long-term reputational damage that might be caused by breaking election promises. In their model of electoral competition, Callander and Wilkie (2007) find that candidates who lie about their policy intentions during an election campaign are at a competitive advantage. Moreover, it could be argued that pledges to cut taxes and expand programmes are exactly the sort of expansionary policies that are needed to boost the economy when it is weak according to Keynesian economic theory.…”

Section: How Economic Conditions Affect Pledge Fulfilmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Thomson

Costello

2016

Irish Political Studies

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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 mechanisms relating to 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 3,681 pledges made by Irish parties in the period 1977 and 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. Studies, 31:2 (2016), pp. 182-203 2 According mandate theory and the responsible party model, the fulfilment of election pledges by governing parties is central to democratic representation, providing a mechanism through which citizens exercise control over public policy (Downs, 1957;Klingemann et al., 1994). Parties offer competing policy platforms to voters and 'the party which attracts the most votes on this basis then forms the next government, but it is bound (both morally and by fears of retribution at the next election) to carry through the program on which on which it has been elected' (Budge & Hofferbert, 1990: 111). This is the author version of an article published in Irish PoliticalExisting research on pledge fulfilment has found considerable variation in the extent to which governing parties fulfil their election pledges and has identified a number of factors that help to explain this, such as the role of the party in government, the institutional division of power, and the nature of the pledges made (e.g. Pomper & Lederman, 1980;Rallings, 1987;Royed, 1996;Thomson, 2001;Artés & Bustos, 2008;Naurin, 2011;2014;Kostadinova, 2013). We contribute to this growing body of comparative research by examining how economic conditions influence pledge fulfilment.Our empirical analysis focuses on pledge fulfilment in Ireland over a 34-year period, 1977-2011. The eleven Irish governments that held office between 1977 and 2011 varied considerably from each other with respect to the economic conditions they faced, including the boom years of the Celtic tiger as well as the bust following the 2008 financial crisis. This means that our cases offer considerable variation in our key explanatory variables concerning economic conditions. Moreover, by examining variation in pledge fulfilment across these eleven governments, we hold constant important features of the political culture, party system and electoral system that may account for some of the variation in pledge fulfi...

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Section: How Economic Conditions Affect Pledge Fulfilmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Thomson

Costello

2016

Irish Political Studies

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“…Banks (1990) analyzes Downsian competition where candidates may make false announcements about their preferred positions, but lying has an exogenous cost that increases in the distance between their preferred and announced positions. While Banks finds pooling of candidate types over an interval containing the median voter's most preferred position, Callander and Wilkie (2007) shows that if there is a cheap talking type in the model, pooling happens at two disjoint intervals on either side of the median voter's ideal point. Thus, the "best" types (those that are preferred most by the median voter) pool in the former paper while the "moderate" types pool in the latter, and all the other types separate.…”

Section: Continuous Type Spacementioning

confidence: 96%

Campaign rhetoric and the hide-and-seek game

Bhattacharya

2016

Soc Choice Welf

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We present a model of political campaigning where a candidate chooses between promoting oneself (positive campaign) or attacking the rival (negative campaign). Candidates vary only by quality. Campaign choices determine the subject of public deliberation: If a candidate runs a positive campaign and his rival a negative campaign, the voters learn the quality of the "focal" candidate. Thus, negative campaigns may be used either to expose the rival candidate (informative role) or to turn attention away from oneself (non-informative role). The effect of negative campaigns depends on whether it is faced with another negative campaign (cross talk) or a positive campaign (fruitful debate). We suggest that in order to ascertain the effect of negative advertising, studies should take into account the campaigns employed by both candidates. Voter beliefs about candidate quality plays a major role in campaign selection: while the incidence of negative campaigning goes down as the prior probability of a candidate being good increases, the probability of selection of the correct candidate is non-monotonic in the said prior.

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“…But electoral disappointment can be introduced as a shift of voters distribution, correlated with the degree of electoral fulfillment. To make things simple as possible assume that median voter distribution is shifted to left in the case of an R incumbent, or to the right in the case of an L incumbent of a fix factor x > 0, if the elected officer deviates from the expected policy(ies) 10 . The reader can easily verify that the claim of Theorem 8 holds even if we impose electors' beliefs about the two candidates to be independent.…”

Section: From Equation 1 It Follows Thatmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is strong 9 Which is allowed by our definition of equilibrium. 10 Excluding the case of a totally out of equilibrium policy, which defines the MD1 criterion.…”

Section: From Equation 1 It Follows Thatmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…But they do pay a price, even when they 1 The authors themselves admit that this approach does not seems a "compelling explanation because of how campaign promises can have effect since it rests on the existence of a nontrivial set of indifferent voters". 2 Costly electoral campaign can be relevant (Banks (1990) and Callander and Wilkie (2005)). …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Reliability and Responsibility: a Theory of Endogenous Commitment

Triossi

2007

SSRN Journal

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A common assumption in Political Science literature is policy commitment: candidates maintain their electoral promises. We drop such assumption and we show that costless electoral campaign can be an effective way of transmitting information to voters. The result is robust to relevant equilibrium refinements. An unavoidable proportion of ambiguous politicians emerges, consistently with empirical findings. JEL Classification: D72, P16, C73

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Lies, damned lies, and political campaigns

Cited by 142 publications

References 21 publications

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

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

Campaign rhetoric and the hide-and-seek game

Reliability and Responsibility: a Theory of Endogenous Commitment

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