Home>Research>Project>UNEQUALMAND - Unequal mandate responsiveness? How electoral promises and their realizations target groups in France and Germany

UNEQUALMAND - Unequal mandate responsiveness? How electoral promises and their realizations target groups in France and Germany

THE PROJECT

Are social groups equal when it comes to election pledges and their fulfilment? How do citizens react to the targeting of pledges to certain social groups? Does it affect their sense of being well represented? The UNEQUALMAND project examines these questions using election pledges of French and German executives over the past 25 years, and surveys of citizens in both countries.

It is funded for a period of 3 years (July 2022-June 2025) by the ANR and the DFG in the framework of the Franco-German Programme in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

PROJECT OBJECTIVES

Political equality is a core requirement and a key principle of democracy. However, one main hypothesis of this project is that political actors not only disproportionately appeal to certain groups when making pledges, but also that pledge fulfilment is not constant and varies depending on the characteristics of the social groups, i.e. their mobilisation resources and social images.

This project is the first to map social groups addressed in electoral pledges and their effective realisations, and to account for the respective modalities of targeting. It draws on a mixed-method research design combining hypothesis-testing with more inductive approaches. For studying how political actors target groups, macro-level quantitative data on promises and their realisation will be gathered, and analysed in order to test the hypotheses and to design surveys and experiments on voters’ reactions.