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.