Were the most important election pledges fulfilled? An empirical investigation of the Swedish government’s pledge fulfillment after the 2014 parliamentary election

Abstract: This thesis provides an account of the pledge-making and eventual pledge fulfilment of the Swedish government of 2014, which consisted of the Social Democratic Party and the Green Party. It is grounded in the theoretical approaches of the mandate model of representation and promissory representation. It explores whether the pledges these two parties made within issue areas that their voters identified as being the most important in guiding their choice of party were fulfilled at a higher rate than pledges in issue areas that did not guide voters’ choice of party on election day to the same degree. The methodological approach consists of testing whether the pledges from the parties’ election manifestos were fulfilled during the 2014-2018 governmental period, and using multinomial logistic regression analyses to test which factors influenced their fulfilment. The results regarding the influence of pledge importance on the likelihood of pledge fulfilment are conflicting. The Social Democrats fulfilled more pledges than the Green Party, but they were less likely to fulfil pledges in issue areas their voters had identified as especially important in guiding their decision to vote for the party. In comparison, the Green Party was slightly more likely to fulfil the more “important” pledges.