Election season is just behind us and the conventional wisdom is that candidates have been handing out promises as freely as candy on Halloween—promises they have little intention of keeping. But a new University of Illinois study reveals that Senate and House candidates of both parties do a good job of backing up their promises once in office.
“Many believe that campaigns have devolved into little more than opportunities for candidates to launch personal attacks at one another,” says Tracy Sulkin, an LAS professor of political science who conducted the study. “But we found that campaigns, for all of their faults, do a fairly good job in allowing voters to predict what winners will do once in office.”
Historically, Sulkin says, political scientists have studied campaigns and legislative actions separately, and they have rarely looked at the connections between the two. So she set about examining the links between campaign promises and legislative action by studying about 400 House representatives and 85 senators elected or re-elected in 1998, 2000, and 2002.
The U of I team began by tracking promises made in over 3,000 television ads compiled by the Campaign Media Analysis Group and the Wisconsin Ads Project—ads that ran in the top 75 to 100 media markets in the country. They tallied the number of promises made on any one of 18 different issues, including defense, agriculture, civil rights, education, jobs, taxes, and crime.
Then, once the officials were in office, Sulkin tracked the bills that were either introduced or co-sponsored by the officials to find out if they had any relation to the promises made.
“The bottom line,” Sulkin says, “is that candidates who talk about an issue are much more active about it in office than candidates who don't talk about it.”
The researchers also found that senators don't follow through on promises quite as consistently as representatives, but Sulkin says that is largely because senators talk about a wider range of issues.
“The typical House candidate will talk about four or five issues in a campaign,” she says. “Their campaigns tend to be fairly narrowly focused, which is more reason to expect the promises to be kept. Senate candidates will talk about an average of seven or eight different issues.”
Sulkin says that House candidates often followed through on promises no matter if the issues were featured prominently in the campaign ads or not. But this wasn't true for Senate candidates. If senators mentioned an issue in only one ad but never mentioned it again, the link to their behavior in Congress wasn't as strong. But if they featured the issue prominently in ads, she did see a link.
According to Sulkin, they also found that it really doesn't make a difference if candidates talk about an issue in broad, general terms, or get highly specific. They are just as likely to follow through on promises. In addition, ideological extremity does not make a difference.
What does make a difference, she says, is how secure a candidate is in his or her office. People often assume that if elected officials are more secure in their position, they have more freedom to ignore promises. They are not as accountable. But that is not the case.
“You have to step back and think about why people are safe in their offices in the first place,” Sulkin says. “They tend to be safe because they're responsive. It pays off for them. They have an incentive to keep promises.”
