Election promises connect citizens’ preferences to government action. Parties and candidates advance commitments in campaigns; citizens may use these commitments to choose among alternatives and subsequently to reward or punish office-holders. This promissory conception of representation is central to democratic accountability, but its operation is increasingly shaped by the conditions captured in the Congress theme, Uncertain Democracies: Rethinking Governance in a Changing Global System. Fiscal and economic disruption, polarization, populist mobilization, contested constitutional norms, misinformation, technological change, and democratic backsliding can alter both what political actors promise and their capacity or willingness to fulfil those promises.
This open panel invites research on the making, communication, interpretation, fulfilment, and consequences of political promises, broadly understood. It seeks to connect established questions about mandate representation and government performance with citizens’ perspectives: how voters encounter, assess, remember, contest, and act upon promises and records of delivery. It also welcomes work on the changing informational environment of promise-making, including digital platforms, media systems, misinformation, artificial intelligence, and promise-tracking initiatives, as well as the economic pressures and policy disruptions that constrain governing choices.
The panel takes a global perspective and is methodologically pluralist. We particularly encourage contributions on emerging, transitional, decentralized, non-Western, hybrid, and competitive-authoritarian systems, while welcoming work from all regional contexts. Relevant contributions may address the content and credibility of election pledges; institutional, political, and economic conditions of fulfilment; normative dilemmas surrounding illiberal or exclusionary commitments; and variation across regime types, levels of government, and social groups. We welcome quantitative, qualitative, mixed-method, experimental, theoretical, normative, comparative, and single-case research from scholars at all career stages and across scholarly traditions. By bringing these perspectives together, the panel aims to advance a globally grounded understanding of whether and under what conditions promissory representation can sustain democratic accountability in uncertain democracies.