A Credible Change: How Parties Use Election Promises to Counteract The Loss of Reputation When They Dilute Their Policy Positions

When parties change their political positions, they risk being perceived as opportunistic and insincere by voters. How can parties change their positions without losing face? In this study, I argue that parties can combine positional change with a promise-based strategy to try to mitigate the reputational loss of this shift. Instead of focusing on the past, a party can attempt to gain credibility by taking high responsibility for a future policy. Since parties mostly lose credibility by diluting their ideological positions, I expect the promise-based strategy to be particularly useful in such situations. After identifying promises in hundreds of election manifestos across 32 countries, I show that parties make more promises when they dilute their position compared to when they stick to their position or crystallize it. This effect is statistically significant and increases when parties dilute their positions on their most salient issues. These results have implications for parties’ communication strategies and our understanding of credibility in modern politics.