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Promise Keepers
Evan
Ringquist was determined to find out once and for all: Are politicians
liars?
Bernard Baruch said, “Vote for the man who promises least;
he’ll be the least disappointing.” It’s no surprise
that politicians are widely considered pants-on-fire liars. What was
surprising, at least to Evan Ringquist, was the lack of data to support
or refute that commonly held assumption.
Ringquist set out to find answers, correlating ten years’ worth
of Congressional campaign pledges with voting records in six critical
policy areas: crime and gun control, morality (abortion and illegal
drugs), health care, foreign affairs and trade, employment and affirmative
action, and poverty and welfare. He embarked on this journey with
the help of the 27 SPEA undergraduates who had signed up for his class,
“Promises and Performance in the U.S. Congress.”
In Search of Promises
Ringquist immediately confronted his first daunting hurdle: actually
finding the campaign promises. “We obviously couldn’t
listen to all the speeches that all the candidates made over ten years.
Then we thought about using candidates’ Web sites, but it turns
out that Web sites contain very little specific information about
candidates’ intentions. You hardly ever find information on
things like free trade or environmental policy.”
Just as he was beginning to question the feasibility of his endeavor,
Ringquist discovered Project Vote Smart, a nonprofit organization
responsible for a pre-election survey called the National Public Awareness
Test (NPAT).
“It’s a terrific resource,“ says Ringquist. “Their
sole purpose is to provide objective information to citizens about
their government.” Project Vote Smart covers candidates and
elected officials in five categories: biographical information, issue
positions, voting records, campaign finances, and interest group ratings.
Ringquist gathered a decade’s worth of NPAT answers, from 1992-2002,
amounting to tens of thousands of pages of data, and used these responses
as a measure of campaign pledges.
The professor and his students then searched every bill in every Congress,
zeroing in on those bills that matched NPAT questions. “Once
we coded all the votes on all these dozens of bills, we were able
to figure out exactly how often members kept their campaign promises.”
The Findings
So, do politicians make good on their word after all?
“The classic academic answer is: that depends,” says
Ringquist. “One thing I found reassuring is that there’s
basically no difference between Democrats and Republicans. Each group
keeps its promises about 60 percent of the time. On the other hand,
in at least one area, foreign policy, the percentage of promises kept
is 50 percent, no better than a coin flip.”
 Results vary substantially across policy areas. Health care promises,
for instance, fare better than foreign policy pledges. “Health
care is more salient to constituents than is foreign policy,”
says Ringquist. “So the positive spin is that politicians are
more likely to keep their promises on issues that matter most to voters.
Also, foreign policy is generally seen as the area where the president
has the most influence. Voting in favor of the president can be seen
as an expression of presidential deference.”
No Preconceived Notions
Asked if he found his results surprising, Ringquist—a firm believer
in the idea that true scientific research should answer a question,
not support a preexisting conclusion—says he wasn’t surprised
because he had no expectations going in. “I truly did not know
what I was going to find.” He was, however, “disappointed
that overall the percentage of promise-keeping wasn’t higher.”
Ringquist is looking forward to continuing and expanding on political
promise-keeping, but he is concerned that his key resource—responses
to Project Vote Smart’s NPAT survey—will have less to
offer as fewer politicians participate in the survey. “Candidates
are becoming very wary of providing this information because they’re
afraid it will be misinterpreted or taken out of context and used
against them. So now leaders of both parties are advising their candidates
not to answer the survey. I just hope it doesn’t get to the
point that we can’t do this research because the data aren’t
there.”
Ringquist hopes the data are available for years to come. “I
initially went into this project thinking I’d answer one small
question about whether politicians keep their promises on environmental
policy. Now this work is one of the centerpieces of
my research agenda. I’m sure it will lead me places that I can’t
even foresee right now.”
Evan Ringquist, professor in the
School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University,
began his academic training at Moorhead State University, receiving
degrees in political science, economics, and biology, and continued
this training at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he
received an M.A. and Ph.D. in political science and M.S. in environmental
studies.
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