Democratic performance in post-communist Bulgaria: election pledges and levels of fulfillment, 1997–2005

Abstract

Abstract This study examines the nature of election promises made by political parties in Bulgaria during the 1997 and 2001 elections, and evaluates the factors that determine pledge fulfilment. The seven parties that took part in these elections made 792 pledges and fulfilled an average of 60% of them. A combination of institutional characteristics, i.e. size of the party, the nature of the pledges, as well as the agreement between pledges made by different parties, explains the probability of fulfilment. Election promises related to European Union accession are also more likely to be fulfilled than other types of pledges. Keywords: election promisespledge fulfilmentmandate theory of democracypost-communist democracy Notes For further details on the methodology of the CMP data, see https://manifesto-project.wzb.eu/ The research design section and the appendix explain the coding of pledges and their fulfilment used by this approach. Roberts (Citation2008), however, uses opinions of party experts to measure fulfilment, an approach that is different from the one used in the pledge studies literature, which relies on fact checking through government and legislative documents. Thus, the comparison between Roberts's (Citation2008) results and those generated by the rest of the pledge studies literature should be interpreted with caution. Lipsmeyer (Citation2009), another study applying the mandate framework to the post-communist countries, does not account for government participation. There are no other studies focused on the post-communist countries that measure and test pledge fulfilment with respect to more general economic policies advocated by political parties. Lipsmeyer (Citation2009) uses CMP data for favourability to communism. However, during the time periods analysed here, parties in Bulgaria did not mention the communist past very much (CMP data this variable includes mostly zeros); using the same data is thus not possible in this analysis. Bulgarian parties differed greatly on their positions with regards to favouring a planned (or a market) economy. To facilitate the interpretation of the regression coefficients later in the analysis, i.e. that pledges favouring government expansion are more likely to be fulfilled if the party has a higher favourability to planned economy, I have selected to use the CMP Planeco variable. Replacing it with a variable to capture support for market economy instead does not change the substantive conclusions of the analysis. Nine of the 11 variables used in the analysis are dichotomous, taking on a value of either zero (0) or one (1), thus not warranting a separate table for descriptive statistics. Their frequencies are as follows: Fulfilled: 470; Govt: 273; Single: 60; Status quo: 23; Agree others: 276; Agree opposn: 86; Agree govt 113; Expand: 263; EU: 34. Only the variables reflecting the legislative strength of the party or its position on support for planned economy are continuous, with the following descriptive statistics. Seat share has a minimum value of five and a maximum of 57.08, with a mean of 25.52 and a standard deviation of 16.71. Planeco has a minimum value of 0.34 and a maximum of 9.45, with a mean of 4.45 and a standard deviation of 2.82. For example, political parties in Spain in the period 1989–2000 devoted only 1.4% of their pledges to status quo statements, while Ireland (in 2002) with 5% of such pledges is comparable to Bulgaria. Only election manifestos in older democracies, such as the USA and the UK, are characterised by a relatively large share of status quo promises, 19.5% and 11.8%, respectively. The percentages comparing Bulgaria to other democracies are the author's calculations from studies on Western democracies cited through the text and listed in the bibliography section. Roberts (Citation2008) includes status quo pledges made by Czech parties in the statistical analysis but does not provide descriptive statistics. Figure 2, which is discussed below, highlights the impact of party ideology through the programmatic emphasis on planned economy on pledge fulfilment. In other words, the predicted probabilities graphed in the first two columns of Figure 1 reflect a situation when the dichotomous variables are held at zero, and the continuous ones – at their means. Due to space limitations, the narrative of the analysis cannot provide examples of all possible combinations of the explanatory variables. Figure 1 thus highlights differences in likelihood of pledge fulfilment when Seat share is varied, while at the same time changing the values of one other dichotomous explanatory variable. Showing differences in likelihood of pledge fulfilment when Seat share is varied between the two extremes (the smallest and the largest party in the sample) highlights the greatest change in the impact of the Seat share variable. The likelihood of the Seat share variable for parties whose legislative strength falls between these two extremes would fall between the estimated predicted probabilities. As with the previous variables, the discussion and interpretation of results focus on the full model specification, utilising the Seat share measure, and are presented in Model 8.