The game of manifestos!

• Date: 01 May 2019
• Published date: 01 May 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/pa.1917
• Author: Ashish Pandey

PRACTITIONER PAPER

The game of manifestos!

Ashish Pandey

Fellow Program Participant, Finance and

Accounting Area, IIM Indore, Indore, India

Correspondence

Ashish Pandey, Fellow Program Participant,

Finance and Accounting Area, IIM Indore,

Indore 453556, India.

Email: fi16ashishp@iimidr.ac.in

This paper investigates, leveraging a simple two‐stage game with incomplete informa-

tion, the motivation behind announcing unreasonable commitments in the manifesto

by candidates and political parties. I analyse the expected communication pattern in

an environment where legal costs are not imposed for broken promises and psycho-

logical costs related to lying are not incurred by candidates. I demonstrate that there

is an absence of separation between a high‐type candidate and a low‐type candidate

regarding the degree to which they indulge in “cheap talk.”This paper also analyses

the introduction of a penalty for broken promises and establishes that an imposition

of penalty has the potential to improve the behaviour of political parties by inducing

separation.

1|INTRODUCTION

Political parties and candidates routinely announce a manifesto prior to

an election promising various sops to the electorate. This commitment

to implement various policy measures or incentive mechanisms is rarely

fulfilled in its entirety by the winningparty. At least, a section of voters is

also aware of the lack of reliability of electoral promises (Naurin, 2011).

The starting point of an electoral communication analysis is the cheap

talk model with no costs attributed to the candidate for lying and incom-

plete verifiability of information. Under this model construct, there is no

information transmission from candidates to voters, and voters form

their voting decision by assessing the past performance of the candidate

(Harrington, 1992; Persson & Tabellini, 2000). Subsequent studies

(Asako, 2015; Banks, 1990; Kartik & McAfee, 2007) have contradicted

the findings of cheap talk model and have instead argued that electoral

promises are informative in nature subject to the congruence of candi-

date's policy position with electorate and candidate's character. In the

theories supporting the view that electoral promises contain informa-

tion, voters exercise their franchise based on candidates' campaign

promises. Cross‐country empirical studies corroborate the assertion

regarding the utility of electoral promises. Empiricists report that the

proportion of electoral promises that is kept intact in a representative

democracy ranges between 50% and 100% (Naurin, 2014; Schermann

& Ennser‐Jedenastik, 2014).

Whereas there is a substantial discussion in the literature on the

nature of the information contained in electoral promises and the

use of such information by voters in the decision‐making process,

there is a limited discussion on the extent of promises that are

expected from a candidate in an election process. Specifically, the

amount of surplus that a candidate is willing to share in a multicandi-

date election process without a concern for strategic re‐election and

psychological cost of lying is unknown. In this paper, using a game the-

ory construct, I investigate the motivation of political parties to

include unreasonable promises in their manifesto. I analyse the

expected communication pattern in an environment where legal costs

are not imposed for broken promises and psychological costs are not

incurred by candidates due to lying. I demonstrate that there is an

absence of separation between a high‐type candidate and a low‐type

candidate regarding the degree to which they indulge in “cheap talk.”I

introduce a penalty for broken promises and establish that an imposi-

tion of penalty has a potential to improve the behaviour of political

parties by inducing separation.

This paper is related to the literature on modelling elections as

games or auctions, where candidates (bidders) are competing for the

vote of the electorate (seller). This body of literature originated with

Downs (1957) where he opined that candidate's electoral promises

(representing policy positions) affect voting behaviour with voters

aligning with a candidate that most closely resembles their own

beliefs. The motivation and theoretical construct of this paper are dif-

ferent from the standard analysis of “First Past the Post

1

”elections as

an “All Pay”auction in which there is only one winner, but all bidders

pay the entire value of their bids in the form of campaign expenditure.

1

The candidate with the plurality of votes is the winner in a “First Past the Post”

election. The losing party or parties win no representation at all. This is the case

with India.

Received: 7 January 2019 Accepted: 8 January 2019

DOI: 10.1002/pa.1917

J Public Affairs. 2019;19:e1917.

https://doi.org/10.1002/pa.1917

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pa 1of5