Election promise

Across the Western world, political parties aren't highly likely to fulfill their election promises.

[1] In the United States, platform positions offer important clues as to the policies that U.S. parties will enact.

[2] A 2017 study in the American Journal of Political Science found that for 12 countries (Austria, Bulgaria, Canada, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States) found that political parties fulfill their promises to voters to a considerable extent:[1] Parties that hold executive office after elections generally fulfill substantial percentages, sometimes very high percentages, of their election pledges, whereas parties that do not hold executive office generally find that lower percentages of their pledges are fulfilled.

We found the highest percentages of pledge fulfillment for governing parties in the United Kingdom, Sweden, Portugal, Spain, and Canada, most of which governed in single-party executives.

Pledge fulfillment by U.S. presidential parties lies at the higher end of coalition governments, which suggests that U.S. presidents are more constrained than governing parties in single-party parliamentary systems, but less constrained than most governing parties in multiparty coalitions.Other research on the United States suggests that Democratic and Republican congresspeople voted in line with their respective party platforms 74% and 89% of the time, respectively.