Electoral Consequences of Individual Politicians’ Pledge Fulfilment

Abstract

Voters’ ability to act upon the fulfilment of election pledges matters profoundly for democratic accountability. Existing literature provides evidence of retrospective voting on pledge fulfilment at the party level. This paper investigates retrospective voting on pledges at the level of individual politicians. It estimates the effect of breaking a pledge to support anti-corruption legislation on Czech deputies’ preferential votes. Since the pledge was identical for all the participating deputies and not all deputies pledged, the data permit estimation of the effect of pledge breakage independently of the effect of voting against anti-corruption bills. Results show that retrospective voting on pledges occurs even at the level of individual politicians when information about pledge fulfilment is easily accessible. Voters “punish” pledge breakage alone, i.e., they do not punish voting against anti-corruption bills if the politician has not pledged to act otherwise.