Promises, Policies, and Accountability

• In Event: Economic Interests and Elections

Abstract

In representative democracy, elected politicians should implement the policy platform advertised during their campaign, as not doing so may cost them their re-election (Aragones et al. 2007). Knowing this, voters choose the candidate whose platform aligns most closely with their own preferences (Downs 1957). However, in practice, do political leaders truly uphold their electoral promises? And do voters take this into account when making their choice? Despite their importance in political economy, we lack systematic evidence to validate these key hypotheses, due to the limited availability of large-scale data on campaign promises. Existing studies mostly focus on national party platforms or the speeches of a limited number of candidates, such as presidential candidates. In this paper, we exploit the electoral platforms published by 45,000 candidates in Brazilian municipal elections from 2012 to 2020. Using text-as-data methods, we compare the content of these platforms with various indicators reflecting the policy priorities of elected mayors after the election. Preliminary results indicate that mayors who emphasized a particular policy topic during their campaign (agriculture, health, education, etc.) choose to allocate a larger portion of their budget to the same sector once elected, and to apply for more federal grants related to that sector as well. These correlations are robust to the inclusion of a wide set of controls as well as candidate fixed effects across elections, suggesting a causal interpretation of the results: promises do affect policies. Next, we find suggestive evidence that voters care about these promises: they cast more votes for candidates who advertise specific programs (rather than vague proposals) and incumbents who deviated from their previous platform receive fewer votes in the next election.

Authors

• Caroline Le Pennec, HEC Montreal

• Claudio Ferraz, PUC-Rio