Assessing the Constituency-Based Pledges in Pledge Making and Fulfillment in the United States and Turkey

This dissertation explores pledges made by the two main parties in the United States between 2001 and 2016 and the two main parties in Turkey between 2002 and 2015 to understand the role of constituency-based pledges and pledges made to various constituency groups in pledge making and pledge fulfillment in these societies. By utilizing descriptive analyses and relying on theories of partisan sorting and partisan polarization concerning parties’ pledge-making patterns, findings demonstrate that political parties make a considerable number of pledges targeting a specific constituency group. By using descriptive and predictive analyses and building on theories of punctuated equilibrium and voters’ perception of campaign promises (promise keeping and promise breaking) with respect to parties’ pledge fulfillment patterns, findings show that the likelihood of pledge fulfillment is lower for constituency-specific pledges than for mass appeal pledges in the US context and the constituency variable is not statistically significant in the Turkish case. These results pose grave concerns about the representation dynamics of certain groups and are indicative of potential disadvantages of high and asymmetric pledge fulfillment of certain groups at the expense of others, thereby potentially aggravating group-level inequalities. Accordingly, whereas high pledge fulfillment would be desirable from a democratic responsiveness perspective in this chain of program-to-policy linkage, it might potentially exert negative effects on certain groups that could not reap as many benefits as others.