Using an innovative mix of cross-national analyses, original survey experiments, and detailed case studies across advanced democracies, Promises Made, Promises Kept provides a compelling exploration of how globalization constrains domestic politics and transforms the nature of democratic representation. The authors show how globalization reduces the ability of governing parties to keep their campaign promises, and how parties strategically adapt to this by making vaguer promises or shifting their rhetoric to manage voter expectations. These adaptations have significant consequences: they reshape democratic competition and have contributed to the growing appeal of populist messaging. This timely and accessible book offers fresh insight into why promises are broken, how parties adapt under pressure, and what this means for voters, institutions, and the future of democratic politics. Essential reading for anyone concerned with the health of democracy in an interdependent world. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

According to widely held views on good democratic practice, when political parties are in government, they should generally keep the promises they made to voters during the previous election campaigns that brought them to power. But what happens when things change dramatically between the times of promising and governing? We develop and test a theory of how economic uncertainty and change affects promise keeping. We argue that when parties formulate election pledges amid high levels of uncertainty, they make promises that can be kept even when significant negative economic changes transpire. We test the implications of the theory using a mixed methods approach, including a quantitative analysis of over 9000 election pledges made by parties from 13 countries. We also present new quantitative and qualitative evidence on pledge fulfillment by Australian parties, which offers a highly relevant test of the impact of unexpected events.

The central idea of promissory representation is that parties make promises to voters during election campaigns and then fulfil those promises after elections if they have the power to do so. Until now, most comparative research on the making, breaking, and keeping of parties' campaign promises, or "election pledges," has considered Western democracies. The present study examines pledge fulfilment in India, focusing on pledges made by the two main Indian parties, the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Indian National Congress at the 2009 and 2014 national parliamentary elections. The evidence indicates that election pledges are prominent parts of electoral discourse and policymaking in India, as they are in Western countries. However, the form of pledge making and keeping is characterised by the distinctive features of Indian politics, notably the prevalence of valence politics on socio-economic issues and identity politics on issues relating to religion, castes and tribes, and gender.

Despite the centrality of promise keeping to representation, we know little about how it is affected by economic globalization, which is one of the modern world's defining characteristics. We argue that globalization reduces governing parties' ability to keep their campaign promises. We test the empirical implications of our theory with a mixed-methods approach that combines a large-n quantitative comparative analysis of pledge fulfillment with a typical case study to trace the underlying causal mechanisms of the theory. The findings indicate that international economic integration exerts a large negative effect on the likelihood of pledge fulfillment in a broad range of contexts and that the hypothesized mechanisms are clearly observable in the detailed case study. These findings have important implications for democratic representation in a globalized world.

Despite the centrality of promise keeping to representation, we know little about how it is affected by economic globalization, which is one of the modern world's defining characteristics. We argue that globalization reduces governing parties' ability to keep their campaign promises. We test the empirical implications of our theory with a mixed-methods approach that combines a large- n quantitative comparative analysis of pledge fulfillment with a typical case study to trace the underlying causal mechanisms of the theory. The findings indicate that international economic integration exerts a large negative effect on the likelihood of pledge fulfillment in a broad range of contexts and that the hypothesized mechanisms are clearly observable in the detailed case study. These findings have important implications for democratic representation in a globalized world.

Coalition negotiations are a cornerstone of parliamentary democracies, characterised by complex interactions and strategic communications among political parties. Despite its significance, the modelling of these negotiations has remained unexplored with the domain of Natural Language Processing (NLP), mostly due to lack of proper data. In this paper, we introduce coalition negotiations as a novel NLP task, and model it as a negotiation between large language model-based agents. We introduce a multilingual dataset, POLCA, comprising manifestos of European political parties and coalition agreements over a number of elections in these countries. This dataset addresses the challenge of the current scope limitations in political negotiation modelling by providing a diverse, real-world basis for simulation. Additionally, we propose a hierarchical Markov decision process designed to simulate the process of coalition negotiation between political parties and predict the outcomes. We evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) as agents in handling coalition negotiations, offering insights into their capabilities and paving the way for future advancements in political modelling.

This study examines a project in China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) from a governance perspective, according to which the BRI is constructed through negotiations involving a diverse range of actors. The analysis focuses on the relationships among actors with different interests and resources, and traces how these shaped the design of the project. This approach differs from broader geostrategic discourses of the BRI. While the geostrategic perspectives have enriched our understanding of China's policies, the governance perspective offers a valuable bridging theory to inform analyses of how BRI projects are designed and implemented on the ground. The analysis was carried out using extensive documents from the Thai government, and interviews were conducted to enhance and refine the analysis. The Sino-Thai railway project highlights how the actors involved in bureaucratic processes and the network relations among them at domestic and bilateral levels have significant impacts on project design.

According to the transaction-costs perspective on delegation, decision-makers grant more discretion to implementers in relation to policies that are more complex and therefore require more specialist expertise to implement. Furthermore, decision-makers grant less delegation to implementers when those implementers have divergent preferences and are therefore more costly to monitor. The transaction-costs perspective has implications for the design of international agreements, such as those adopted by the European Union (EU) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). While delegation in the EU has been the subject of systematic research, delegation in ASEAN has not. We argue that ASEAN offers a particularly hard test of the transaction-costs perspective, especially in relation to its propositions concerning implementers’ policy preferences. Notwithstanding the unique characteristics of ASEAN, the evidence provides strong support for the transaction-costs perspective both in terms of specialist expertise and implementers’ preferences. The new dataset we examine includes information on more than 8,500 major provisions within the 235 legal instruments adopted by ASEAN since 1967.

Election pledges feature prominently in the theory and practice of representation and have been examined extensively in a growing field of comparative research. However, research in this field has largely ignored non-Western democracies and the world's largest electoral democracy, India. The present analysis begins to fill this lacuna by examining election pledges made by Indian parties at the national level over a period of two decades (1999-2019) and comparing this with selected Western parties. The extension of research on election pledges to India prompts us to assess the relevance of pledges to the distinctive characteristics of Indian party competition. This differs markedly from the spatial model of party competition that is often applied in pledge research in Western systems. Party competition in India is instead characterised largely by valence politics on socioeconomic issues and by identity politics on religious issues. The quantitative and qualitative analyses demonstrate the distinct features of pledges in policy areas characterised by valence and identity politics. We discuss the implications of the findings for understanding party competition in India and for the broader research programme on election pledges.

The extent to which decision-making in the European Union (EU) is responsive to national democratic representation has profound implications for understanding how the EU works in practice and for assessing it normatively. The contributions to this special issue examine key aspects of national representation, including national public opinion, elections and partisan government control. They do so with a shared theoretical approach and a newly updated common dataset, which facilitates cumulative knowledge. Here, we identify some of the main findings and their implications. Despite seismic political changes in many national arenas, EU decision-making is marked by more continuity than change. The evidence indicates that EU decision-making does respond to national democratic processes, but in ways that are highly conditional. For instance, member states' negotiating positions in the EU are shaped by public opinion and national parties' positions, but this responsiveness is conditioned by the presence of Euroscepticism, the timing and competitiveness of national elections and coalition politics. We discuss the contrasting implications of the findings from the perspectives of promissory representation and liberal democratic theory.

The conventional view of the Commission is that it is above the fray of national politics, and that Commissioners have allegiance to pan-European interests. However, research indicates that the Commission is in many ways imbued with national interests, despite being the engine of integration. This study examines the national Commissioner dividend, which is the tendency for the Commission’s policies on any given issue to agree more with the policy positions of the primarily responsible Commissioner’s home state than with other positions. We examine the conditions under which this national Commissioner dividend may be larger, including Commissioners’ partisanship and personal characteristics. The findings provide clear evidence of a national Commissioner dividend, notwithstanding the Commission’s general pro-integration and pan-European preferences. Moreover, the Commissioner dividend occurs in a broad range of circumstances. The study considers the implications of the findings for the Commission’s role in transmuting national interests into European-level policies.

This study describes and explains the evolution of cooperation networks among member states in the European Union. We examine the effects of similarities between states in their policy positions on specific controversial issues, the ideological orientations of their national governments, and the presence of populist parties in national governments. This builds on a prominent explanation of political ties, according to which political actors who share similar characteristics are likely to cooperate. The analysis examines cooperation networks in the Committee of Permanent Representatives (Coreper I), one of the highest-level committees in the Council, in the period 2003–2018. The findings indicate that states with similar policy positions on specific controversial issues tend to form cooperative relationships, while party ideology indirectly and relatively weakly affects the formation of ties. Surprisingly, the presence of populist parties is unrelated to network evolution. These findings have implications for the extent to which cooperation in the Council is shaped by national democratic processes.

This study examines the recent massive expansion of electricity supply in India. With data from over 120,000 observations relating to households across the country in 2014 and 2019, we describe the rapid but uneven increases in hours of supply. We compare three distinct logics of public service delivery that may account for different rates of improvement in electricity supply - the logics of clientelism, incrementalism and maximin. The clientelist logic posits that state-level elected representatives target investments toward local areas where they hold small margins of support to improve their chances of re-election. According to the logic of incrementalism, policymakers focus on policies that are closely aligned with existing policies, which implies that supply increases most in locations where surrounding areas have relatively good electricity supply. The maximin logic, by contrast, posits that the greatest improvements take place in locations that previously had the poorest supply. The evidence supports each of the three logics to some extent, but by far the strongest evidence supports the maximin logic.

In an election campaign, political parties pledge to implement various projects-should they be elected. But do they follow through ? To track election pledges from parties' election manifestos, we need to distinguish between pledges and general statements. In this paper, we use election manifestos of Swedish and Indian political parties to learn neural models that distinguish actual pledges from generic political positions. Since pledges might vary by election year and party, we implement a Multi-Task Learning (MTL) setup, predicting election year and manifesto ' s party as auxiliary tasks. Pledges can also span several sentences, so we use hierarchical models that incorporate contextual information. Lastly, we evaluate the models in a Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) framework across countries and languages. Our results indicate that year and party have predictive power even in ZSL, while context introduces some noise. We finally discuss the linguistic features of pledges.

Since the Paris Agreement of 2016, the international community's main approach to addressing climate change is for states to determine their own commitments in a pledge and review system. Parties to the Paris Agreement formulate Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), which are documents that give details of their national policies and plans. They are free to formulate and present national policies as they choose, and as a result, there is substantial variation in the content and form of NDCs. This study presents a new framework for assessing and comparing the political meanings of these documents. The framework builds on two distinct ways in which NDCs can be understood. NDCs may be commitments to the international community and domestic actors. Alternatively, they may embody states' negotiating positions in an ongoing process of national and international interactions. The framework consists of a set of thematic categories to which each sentence of these documents can be allocated. The application of this framework enables us to compare the political content of states' NDCs systematically. The study demonstrates the validity of the framework by correlating its results with key characteristics of states. The findings also provide evidence for the two distinct perspectives on these documents.

We assess the impact of the United Kingdom's 2016 decision to leave the European Union on the Council of the European Union, where Brexit is likely to have the clearest observable implications. Using concepts and models from the spatial model of politics and network analysis, we formulate and test expectations regarding the effects of Brexit. We examine two of the most prominent datasets on recent decision-making in the European Union, which include data on cooperation networks among member states before and after the 2016 referendum. Our findings identify some of the political challenges that Brexit will bring, but also highlight the factors that are already helping the European Union's remaining member states to adapt to Brexit.