Piecrust Promises: an Analysis of the Turkish Political Parties' Electoral Pledges

Abstract

Despite major differences among political systems, one can conduct new research on pledge fulfillment by examining previously ignored cases. Accordingly, this article extends the literature by developing a new analysis for the Turkish context. The main contribution of this paper is the introduction of explicit models, which evaluate political pledges and their fulfillment by using an original data set. In particular, this study reveals the following facts: (a) in a comparative perspective, pledge fulfillment is low in Turkey and (b) its governmental forms and economic performance have an impact on pledge fulfillment.