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AbstractMultiple regression analysis is used to test the existence of a link between the programmes of the Progressive Conservative, Liberal and New Democratic parties and subsequent government spending priorities. The analysis shows that the programme of the governing party is a poor predictor of government policies. Instead, public expenditures have been sensitive to changes in the programmes of opposition parties. The analysis also shows that government spending priorities in some important policy areas have been more sensitive to opposition party programmes when the popularity of these parties was rising. While public support has favoured the Liberals for most of the period of analysis, the fragile nature of this support has left the governing Liberals uncertain about their prospects of subsequent victory at the polls. This uncertainty has led the governing Liberals to compromise with the Progressive Conservatives on some issues and to mirror the proposals of the New Democratic party on other issues.

Analyzes links between platforms of the Progressive Conservative, Liberal, and New Democratic parties and subsequent government spending priorities in 12 budget categories; Canada.

The theory of promissory representation (Mansbridge, 2003) proposes that voters select parties based on the pledges they made during the campaign. The elected parties then fulfill their promises and at the next election, voters reward or sanction the parties based on their pledge-fulfillment record. However, a fundamental assumption of promissory representation remains to be tested. If voters use party pledges to decide which party to vote for, they need to know which party made which pledges. To test the degree of awareness of citizens to party pledges, (a factor we dub pledge awareness), we included a module in the 2019 Canadian Election Study (CES) that tasks citizens to associate correctly six pledges found in the different electoral platforms with their respective parties. We find that while citizens may not know all six pledges included in our study, nonetheless, the most frequently selected answers to our pledge awareness questions are the correct ones. We also find that party identification and the information resources at the disposal of citizens play a large role in the citizen's capacity to succeed at this matching task. Our study indicates that respondents tend to be more aware of the pledges made by the party they identify with, and well-informed respondents are more aware of pledges made by the other parties.

AbstractThe determinants of fulfilling campaign promises in Canada over the period 1994–2015 are analyzed in a comparative perspective. All other factors being equal, we find that promises to reduce government spending are more likely to be fulfilled by the Conservatives than by the Liberals. Majority and re-elected governments facing a budget surplus are more likely to fulfill their election promises than minority and newly elected governments facing a budget deficit. Promises are more likely to be fulfilled at the start than at the end of a mandate. We also find a small but noticeable increase in the rate of fulfilling campaign promises over time.

RésuméCet article introduit un nouveau dictionnaire permettant l'analyse automatisée du ton des médias francophones, que nous avons appelé Lexicoder Sentiment Dictionnaire Français (LSDFr) en référence au lexique anglophone de Young et Soroka (2012), Lexicoder Sentiment Dictionary (LSD) à partir duquel le LSDFr a été construit. Une fois construit, nous comparons le LSDFr au seul autre dictionnaire francophone existant de ce genre, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). Nous testons ensuite la validité interne du LSDFr en le comparant avec un corpus de textes codés manuellement. Nous testons enfin la validité externe du LSDFr en mesurant jusqu'où le ton médiatique, calculé à l'aide de notre dictionnaire, prédit les intentions de vote des Québécois lors des quatre dernières campagnes électorales. En développant cet outil, notre objectif est de permettre à d'autres chercheurs d'effectuer des analyses médiatiques dans un corpus de textes comparables en français.

Abstract.We identify frequent inaccuracies in journalistic interpretations of the horse race ("who is ahead?") and of change over time ("who is gaining?") in poll reports during the Canadian election of 2008. We test two explanations. The "mistaken mindset" hypothesis holds that journalists exaggerate the horse race because they systematically miscalculate the margin of error. The "follow-the-pollster" hypothesis holds that journalists follow the horse-race interpretations that they find in pollsters' reports. We find strong support for the "follow-the-pollster" hypothesis in the data and in interviews with pollsters and journalists and conclude that pollsters' reports should be a key element to consider in any attempt to improve the level of accuracy in media reports of the horse race.Résumé.Les journalistes ont souvent commis des erreurs d'interprétation de la marge d'erreur dans les résultats de sondages pendant la campagne électorale canadienne de 2008. Cela les a conduits à surestimer l'avance du parti gagnant et le changement dans le score d'un parti entre deux sondages successifs. Comment expliquer ces erreurs fréquentes? Une première hypothèse affirme que cette surestimation provient du fait que les journalistes se trompent systématiquement dans le calcul de la marge d'erreur. Selon une deuxième hypothèse, les journalistes connaissent tellement mal la marge d'erreur qu'ils se fient à l'interprétation qu'en font les maisons de sondage. Les données empiriques et les réponses aux questions d'entretiens soutiennent la deuxième hypothèse. Nous en concluons que pour mieux porter fruits, les efforts pour améliorer l'interprétation de la marge d'erreur devraient cibler les maisons de sondage autant que les journalistes.