This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on December 19, 2022 - December 25, 2022

“I would rather be accused of breaking precedents than breaking promises.” — John F Kennedy (1917-1963), 35th president of the US

In the course of our lives, we often make promises. We make promises to ourselves. We make promises to others — friends, family, business partners, and political allies. A promise is a “declaration or assurance that one will do something or that a particular thing will happen”.

For example, when a man makes a promise of marriage to a woman, it is often because he wants to guarantee the loyalty of the woman so that she will not entertain another man. A promise is indeed an assurance or reassurance. It is often soothing, deferring hope and making one believe in the future.

We witnessed a flurry of such activities a few weeks ago. Rival political parties were issuing manifestos like they were going out of style — a manifestation of our 15th general election. Their manifestos were basically election promises made to the public in order to win the election.

Now that all the brouhaha is over and a new government has been formed, a question arises: Is the winning political coalition likely to fulfil their election promises?

In politics and politicking, promises are made to the electorate to secure votes. An election promise is effectively a “guarantee made to the public by a candidate or political party that is trying to win an election”. Most of the time, the general public will hold these politicians to their promises. But this does not mean that they, the politicians, will not break their election promises.

Examples from the US bear witness to the fragility of campaign promises. In 2000, while campaigning for the US presidency, George Bush Jr declared, “If we don’t stop extending our troops all around the world in nation-building missions, then we’re going to have a serious problem coming down the road. And I’m going to prevent that.” But it was during his tenure that the US invaded Iraq for the second time and later, pulverised Afghanistan.

Barack Obama promised to close the highly controversial Guantanamo Bay prison if he became president. At the time of this writing, that prison is still standing, even after Donald Trump and now Joe Biden. Can we then trust politicians to fulfil their promises?

There is an old Gaelic proverb that says, “There is no greater fraud than a promise not kept.” If the politician or the government breaks its promise to the people, the people, in turn, will not feel obliged to respect the state. This is where anarchy sets in. Sadly, when some politicians break a promise, they hardly appreciate the level of destruction that they have caused in the polity. Cue the lavishly named “Sheraton Move”. That sneaky manoeuvre almost put paid to our trust in the local political system.

It is easy to break a promise, to ignore a written or unwritten consensus, especially when the levers of power are under the control of one man or a cabal. The message is that we are not only in government, we are also in power! What this means is that because they have the powers of the state behind them, they can alter agreements. What utter rubbish!

They must remember that power is transient. A decision based on greed and self-interest will return to haunt one later in life. It could also lead to an implosion. It is thus instructive for those in power to remember that their days in office will soon be over, and their actions will be scrutinised closely. On which side of the divide would they like to be remembered?

The good news, however, is that recent research around the world has found that most political parties are highly likely to fulfil their election promises. Recent scholarly research across numerous advanced democracies has shown that in truth, most political parties reliably carry out the bulk of their campaign promises, especially in majoritarian systems like Westminster’s, a model we follow very closely.

The finding that political parties carry out their pledges has stood up to repeated cross-national studies. A rapidly growing field of scholarship is dedicated to investigating the connection between manifesto promises and subsequent government policy, known among experts as the “programme-to-policy linkage”. Researchers scrutinise party manifestos for measurable policy pledges and check government actions, legislation and news media sources for evidence of their progress.

The most comprehensive study of the programme-to-policy linkage was published in 2017. It brought together 20,000 specific campaign promises from 57 elections in 12 countries. The strongest linkage was found in the UK, with over 85% of promises by governing parties at least partly enacted in the years studied.

Research has also found that promises are more often fulfilled when a party does not have to share power with others. But in governments where coalition is the norm, such as Austria and Italy (and now Malaysia), fewer election promises become government policy. The politics of compromise built into these democracies means that governing parties typically fulfil only half of their manifesto pledges. Pledge fulfilment is also affected by factors like economic growth, coalition negotiations and the previous governing experience of parties.

The take-home message from this area of study is that politicians do seem to try to keep their promises. The central mechanism by which vote choices are supposed to translate into policy works more smoothly than voters assume.

Why are public beliefs so out of sync with the evidence? A recent study in the UK shows that negativity bias — the tendency for people to react more strongly to negative information — is the main reason that voters remember broken pledges better than fulfilled ones.

Although fulfilling election pledges is not the be-all and end-all of democratic processes, it is fair to say that these research findings rebuke the conventional wisdom that campaign promises are worthless. On the contrary, political parties do take them very seriously, perhaps in fear of being voted out of power in the next election.

On that note, let us perhaps give our new unity government some time to carry out what they promised they would do. If the studies mentioned above are anything to go by, we may be in for a pleasant surprise five years down the road. In God we trust.

Zakie Shariff is the executive chairman of Kiarafics Sdn Bhd, a strategy consulting group. He is also an adjunct professor at the Faculty of Industrial Management, Universiti Malaysia Pahang.

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