The Limited Consequences of Broken Campaign Promises: Experimental Evidence from the United States and Israel

(with Alon Zoizner)

An extensive literature indicates that citizens penalize candidates for breaking their campaign promises. Concurrently, evidence is accumulating that partisans engage in motivated reasoning, and are often reluctant to sanction ingroup politicians for wrongdoing. We test between these conflicting theoretical perspectives with two experiments in the U.S. and Israel, where subjects were exposed to either broken or fulfilled promises by either ingroup or outgroup politicians. In line with the partisan-motivated reasoning account (and with our preregistered expectations), we find that citizens do not sanction ingroup politicians who break their campaign promises. Instead, they use different reasoning strategies to downplay and rationalize the broken promise. In parallel—and in contrast to preregistered expectations—evaluations of outgroup politicians also are not influenced by broken promises; these evaluations are very low regardless of those politicians’ promise breaking. Our results suggest that campaign promises may have a more limited impact on political attitudes than previously thought.

Personality and the Policy Positions of Politicians

(with Lior Sheffer)

Politicians’ support of or opposition to concrete policies is uniquely consequential for policymaking, public opinion, and a host of other societal outcomes. Explaining their policy positions is therefore a major research agenda in political science. Here, we evaluate the role of politicians' personality traits, measured with the Big Five typology, in shaping how liberal or conservative their economic and social policy positions are. While existing research establishes this link among non-elites, it is far from obvious that the same holds for politicians, who have systematically different personality profiles, and whose positions are constrained by party sorting. Using an in-person study of 893 legislators in five countries who completed personality questionnaires and provided detailed issue positions, we find that Openness to Experience is strongly and positively predictive of politicians' liberal positions on both economic and social policies, but a null relationship for Conscientiousness. \hl{We also find that Extraversion predicts more conservative economic (but not social) policy positions.} We discuss implications for the role of elites’ individual characteristics in policymaking.