When Do Broken Campaign Promises Matter? Evidence From Four Experiments

Campaign promises are a central mechanism for voters to hold politicians accountable, and information about their breakage or fulfillment features prominently in the media during election campaigns. Despite the importance of campaign promises, previous research yields conflicting expectations regarding their influence on citizens. Some theories suggest citizens vote based on policy performance and, therefore, consistently penalize actors who break their promises. Other theoretical accounts, however, argue that exposure to information during election campaigns often has minimal effects on citizens due to strongly held prior beliefs and partisan motivations. The goal of the current study is to address these competing claims by systematically testing the conditions under which citizens penalize politicians for breaking promises. We conducted four experiments (total N = 7,030), three of them preregistered, in two countries under varying political conditions. We find that (1) broken promises decrease domain-specific evaluations of leaders but have little impact on evaluations of actors’ overall performance; (2) broken promises have limited effects when people have strong priors about the political actor who made the promise; and (3) citizens downplay and rationalize promises broken by ingroup, but not outgroup, leaders. These results suggest that even though information about broken promises is salient in campaign communications, its impact on citizens is context-dependent and often quite limited.