Permission to break: the news coverage of broken election promises

Abstract

In contemporary representative democracies, election promises are essential to fulfilling the classical democratic ideal of establishing a clear connection between the interests of the public and government actions. Recent evidence has established that governing party(s) often fulfill most of their election promises, yet the public holds the opinion that governments can’t be trusted to keep their promises. One of the explanations put forward for this “pledge puzzle” is that media cover broken promises more extensively and more negatively than kept promises, consistent with theories about negativity bias in political news coverage and public preferences. But is this always the case? Under what circumstances might a broken election promise receive positive or at least nuanced coverage? We attempt to answer this question by analyzing the media coverage of a prominent broken promise in Australia—the Labor government's “Stage Three” tax cuts—that was largely accepted by the public.