Does it matter who is in charge? Ministerial characteristics and pledge fulfilment

Abstract

Pledge fulfilment studies frequently anticipate that party control of a given ministry increases the chance campaign promises within that brief will be enacted. However, existing evidence is mixed, and few studies have looked beyond ministers’ partisan affiliation. It stands to reason that other personal and political characteristics may influence ministers’ ability and motivation to pursue manifesto commitments from within government. Following the ministerial selection and survival literature, which shows that certain characteristics are prioritized by parties, in this paper we investigate the effect of ministers’ previous political and policy-relevant professional experience on the fulfilment of election pledges within their competence. We test these by combining existing election pledge data with information on ministers’ characteristics in five institutionally distinct, small-to-medium sized democracies: Austria, Canada, Czechia, Slovakia and Sweden. We demonstrate that prior ministerial experience enhances ministers’ capacity to deliver on party policy, but that other characteristics have varying effects cross-nationally.