From Party Manifesto to Governmental Policy Performance: the Pilot Case of Slovenia

From party manifesto to governmental policy performance: The pilot case of Slovenia Samo KROPIVNIK and Simona KUSTEC LIPICER University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Social Sciences Authors’ contacts: [email protected]; [email protected] Paper prepared the for the XXV Convegno Società Italiana di Scienza Politica SISP, Università degli Studi di Palermo – Dipartimento di Studi su Politica, Diritto e Società “Gaetano Mosca”, Palermo, 8 - 10 September 2011 This is a draft. Please do not quote without permission from the authors. 1 Abstract: This article draws on the assumption that certain congruence exists between the content of parties’ electoral policy platforms and of the succeeding government’s policy performance and it shall be considered an important indicator of the overall quality of democracy. Therefore, we analyse the association between the policy contents in parties’ electoral programmes and those in key governmental policy documents, i.e. coalition agreements, government sessions’ agenda and weekly press releases, utilising the MARPOR or Manifesto Research on Political Representation (ex CMP, MPG) approach. Slovenia is used as a pilot study to test the application of the original MARPOR methodology to data on governmental policy performance. I. Research Topic Debate focuses on the relation between pre- and post-electoral policy contents based on the understanding of a tight mutual congruence between pre- and post-electoral processes especially their policy content. This paper draws on the idea of election-cycle or election-life of policy issues driven by an understanding of the importance of election-specific policy concerns and their role in the post-election governmental work.1 In other words, once in government, election promises play the important role, they bind parties to their policies (Rose, 1984; Budge and Hofferbert, 1990, 1993; King et. al., 1993; Klingemann, Hofferbert and Budge, 1994; Budge et al., 2001; McDonald and Budge, 2005; Laver, 1998). When speaking about the pre- and post-electoral phenomena in general, we need to be aware that usually two dominant sets of factors can be exposed (Budge 2009): 1) the impact of partisanship, e.g. the enduring predispositions to vote for a party (e.g. ideology or founded cleavage)2 and/or 2) the impact of the wider pre-electoral ‘offers’ made to voters and to the society in general; 1 For the purposes of the paper, electoral cycle is defined on the basis of electoral cycle theory, also known as a political cycle (see Alesina, Roubini, Cohen, 1997), asserting that support for government parties is dependent on the proportion of an inter-election interval that has passed since the last national election (for example see van der Eijk, 2006). 2 See Franklin et al. (1992) on the decline of this. 2 e.g. broader features of the election campaign (the events, issues and candidates) that are supposed to first have a decisive influence on the nature of the elections and later to serve as a commitment to the candidates’ post- electoral performance. If the first scenario relies mainly on the concept of mutual trust and unconditional support between voters and candidates, the second scenario can be much more ‘evidence-based’, founded on expectations that parties would pursue and fulfil their pre-election commitments afterwards. In this paper we follow the logic of the second scenario, in that we start from the predisposition that characteristics of pre-electoral processes have or are assumed to have had some influence on the performance of parties also after elections. This indicates that we should be equally interested in both the pre- as well as post-election performance of candidates according to selected dimensions. In the paper, this dimension is in the context of the election cycle, specifically on the potential congruence between candidates’ attitudes toward pre- and post-election policy issues. From a theoretical perspective, classical spatial, salience, issue voting, policy preferences and mandate theories and concepts explain the importance of the policy in the context of election cycles (see Downs, 1957; Stokes, 1963; Budge et al., eds. 1987; Budge and Hofferbert, 1990; Laver, 1998; Klingemann et al., 2001 etc.). Within these frameworks, an almost endless number of different studies dealing with the role of policies in one or another period of the electoral cycle have been conducted, but not that many of them combine both the before and after periods. Among studies that combine both periods, most of them look into the patterns and strength of correlation between policy contents in the two periods. These studies use different types of data for the two periods, such as party manifesto and government spending data (like Klingeman et al., 1994) or data about coalition building (like Müller, Strøm, 1999). Three distinct theoretical approaches of the previously described ‘correlation’ attempts have been recognised in Petry’s and Collette’s review (2009). The authors classified them as: a) normative, b) mandate or c) constructivist, differentiating them according to their understanding of how policy commitments affect the post-electoral period and how post-electoral performance can be measured in relation to pre-electoral pledges. In the case of normative and constructivist approach, commitments and performance are more or less recognised through moral statements, expert opinion and frequently also intuition, following qualitative-oriented methodology, while the 3 rational-choice oriented mandate theory model builds on the connection between the party’s pre-electoral programme and government expenditure trends (Budge and Hofferbert, 1990; King et. al., 1993; Klingemann et al., 1994).3 Regarding the latter, mandate effect was added later (King et. al., 1993; Gibbons, 2004), while the institutional effects (Laver and Shapsle, 1996; McDonald et al., 1999; Thome, 1999) and process dimensions of coalition building (Strøm, 1990; Lupia and Strøm, 1995; Merlo, 1997; Müller, Strøm 1999; Martin and Stevenson, 2001) that predetermine the future governmental performance are still underestimated. In this regard, special consideration should be devoted to post-electoral policy contents as an independent dimension that has so far proven to have an important impact on the process of coalition building and is at the same time in a tight correlation with the contextual characteristics of pre-electoral policy goals and pledges (Neumann and Morgenstern, 1953; Axelrod 1970; De Swaan 1973; Laver and Schofield, 1990, 1998). Criticism can be connected to the exposed approaches, mostly all related to the problems of either validity or reliability of the measurement. Summing up Petry’s and Collette’s (2009) extensive review of 18 journal articles and book chapters reporting the extent to which election promises have been fulfilled in North America and Europe, which were published in English and French over the past 40 years, most studies either have conceptual weaknesses (like the lack of providing explicit definitions of terms or of units of analysis) or major methodological weaknesses (e.g. no operational definitions or documentation, imperfect research design). Nevertheless, though the authors employ different approaches, with an unequal balance of strengths and weaknesses, between at least 45% and maximum 85% rate of fulfilment of political pre-electoral policy preferences in post-electoral governmental performance can be identified with the impressively high mean value of 67% and modest standard deviation of 10.3 percentage points. Regardless of the approach, all those research pieces draw on the assumption that a high level of congruence between the content of parties’ electoral policy platforms and performance of the succeeding government’s policy platforms can be expected from substantial reasons. In addition, drawing on evidence, it is not possible to deny that there is remarkable congruence between pre- and post-electoral policy 3 Three of the most important criticisms that have been made of their methods (Gibbons, 2004) is that they should have controlled long-term expenditure trends (King et. al., 1993); that the proportion of variance explained is a poor measure of policy implementation (Thome, 1999), and that additional control variables need to be added to their mandate equation (Thome, 1999). 4 contents. However, considering the existing critics, it seems that more elementary and standardised studies are necessary to achieve a better insight and to enable comparability. In contrast with the existing, prevailingly casual type of attempts made to understand correlation between pre- and post-electoral contents, we decided to take a step back in this research and try to do the following: a) Describe issues disclosed by parties’ pre- and post-electoral performance, meaning that we do not take the pre- and post-electoral issues’ cause-and- effect relation as granted, but we want to explore to what extent the structure of policy commitments formulated in the pre-election campaign relates (not correlates) to the structure of governmental work later; b) Employ elementary (mostly not problematic or criticised) part of the MARPOR-coding methodology with regard to the above mentioned aims. Therefore the overall motivation of the paper is to present and demonstrate a new data-gathering and exploring approach to the analysis of the structure of pre- and post-electoral policy contents. For this purpose we present the findings of the pilot-case study we did for Slovenia.

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