What Do We Know About Campaign Pledge Evaluation Tools?

Abstract

In the last decade, new web-based tools to democratize politics are developed and are growing in popularity. In this paper, we explore one such innovation: the campaign pledge evaluation tool (CPET). Given the unique opportunities such tools represent for assessing the political sphere, as well as the unique challenges they pose for accountability and governance, we argue that studying CPETs should be a main facet of future research on politically-relevant technologies. This article circumscribes this new phenomenon in three ways. First, from a normative perspective, we bridge CPET studies to existing fields of research, specifically, pledge studies with a special concern toward conceptual and operational definitions of pledges and their fulfillment. Second, we present a scoping review to provide an exhaustive overview of the academic literature on the subject. Third, we analyze existing CPET tools regarding their origins, designs and methodologies. Finally, we discuss questions surrounding the design and development of CPETs as well as the effects of these tools on citizens attitudes and behaviors. Our main argument is that researchers should begin to look at the impacts of CPETs and that developers of these tools should design measures to weight the promises according to their significance.