Please note this event has been postponed due to unforeseen circumstances. 

Abstract: That parties fulfil their pre-election promises once they are in government is a fundamental idea of many democracy models. In this talk we address the question of whether the opposition status of their party or their ideology affects how much citizens want governments to fulfil their promises. Hypothesising that rational voters will prefer their own as well as ideologically close parties to fulfil their promises, we also investigates the impact of public opinion, expert views, and ideology. We test these hypotheses through a survey experiment conducted in Australia and Austria. It finds that, overall; both government party and opposition voters indeed fit the rational voter explanation. While the opinion of the public and experts mitigates this effect, it does not significantly change it. Ideology sometimes affects how much voters want parties to fulfil their promises but especially mainstream voters do not change their preference depending on which party is in government. Radical right voters, on the other hand, react strongly. Thus, this analysis contributes to our understanding of voters’ attitudes to democracy by showing that voters indeed adapt their attitudes along the lines of rational voter logics but they do not do so consistently.

About the presenter:

Dr Annika Werner is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Politics and International Relations, Australian National University. Her research focuses on party behaviour, representation and public attitudes in the democracies of Europe and Oceania and has been published in journals such as the Journal of European Public Policy, Democratization, Party Politics, International Political Science Review, Representation, and Electoral Studies. Her book “International Populism: The Radical Right in the European Parliament”, co-authored with Duncan McDonnell, is published with Hurst/Oxford University Press. Annika is Steering Group member of the Manifesto Project (MARPOR, former CMP) and Co-Editor of the Australian Journal of Political Science.