Did the parties in the sipilä government keep their election promises?
A comparative perspective on the fulfilment of electoral pledges in Finland, 2015–2019
Keywords:
parliamentary elections, political parties, electoral pledges, electoral manifestosAbstract
In election campaigns, parties pledge to advance a number of things. The general public tends to approach electoral pledges with scepticism. However, systematically collected information has been lacking about the extent to which Finnish parties’ electoral pledges are fulfilled. In this study, methods that have become established in the international literature on the policy effects of parties’ electoral pledges were applied to the pledges included in the manifestos of the parties in Juha Sipilä’s government (2015–2019). An electoral pledge was defined as a commitment to an action or outcome that can be clearly determined to have occurred or not. The occurrence or non-occurrence of the things that were pledged was verified using documents and statistics. In the 2015 parliamentary election, the parties that would join the Sipilä government made 319 pledges in total, 45 per cent of which were at least partially fulfilled by the end of the electoral term. The share is rather small compared to results obtained from several othercountries. However, if one takes into account the fact that the Sipilä government was a multiparty coalition and the parties differed from each other in terms of their experience of being in government, the share of fulfilled pledges is quite average on international standards.
