Promises, promises!

Arvind Mani, Nadi

Euripides was a Greek playwright born around 485 BC who said: “When one with honeyed words but evil mind Persuades the mob, great woes befall the state.”

His words have proven so prophetic over time. And when Professor Biman Prasad declared that he would make a new mill in Penang if he wins, I was reminded of it again.

What are election promises for? Who on earth do they convince?

This is the promises dilemma. Elections are commitment games. We vote for the candidates and parties whose values and policies are most appealing.

But how can we be sure they’ll follow through? All we have is their word - their assurance they will act in a certain way under certain circumstances.

Of course, commitment problems are common across all spheres of human endeavor. In the marketplace we often pay up front for services to be rendered later.

But we have courts to enforce commercial contracts that have not been fulfilled. In politics, there is no institutional mechanism by which voters can enforce the pledges that their elected representatives have made. HL Mencken famously defined an election as “an advance auction sale of stolen goods”. He was not cynical enough. Voters bid without any guarantee that the auction will proceed to settlement.

But elections are weak discipline. They’re only held every four years. And four years is a long time to wait to enforce a contract.

Elections are an imperfect control. Sure, voters weigh up the honesty of candidates, but honesty is not the only factor that determines an election.

There are other constraints on breaking election promises. A dissatisfied electorate, even in non-election years, can make it hard to pursue your agenda.

Politicians may even be constrained by personal ethics... who knows?

If politicians really wanted to demonstrate a credible commitment to the electorate, as the economist Robin Hanson writes, they would post personal bonds – e.g. their homes – that would be forfeited if a promise was broken. Then we’d know they had skin in the game. Of course no politicians do this.

So why the promises?

Here’s one answer. Parties don’t see election promises as promises in the plain English meaning of the word.

Instead, promises are signals designed to express a deeper character of the political party.

This practice is, of course, deeply deceptive – election promises as signals rather than genuine commitments – but it’s a deception we’re used to.

Voters are rational. We know campaign nonsense when we see it. Voters infer the true policy position of candidates for office despite the thicket of untruths. But let’s not pretend to be surprised.

We’ve been voting for broken promises for a very long time.

Political promises are tricky things: created to charm, and made to be broken.

The cynical ease with which voters sometimes assume they’re being lied to isn’t some random distrust — rather, it’s a time-tested reaction to what we know to be true about politicians.

It’s not just promises to voters that politicians break, either. Sometimes, they’re just as comfortable breaking promises to their colleagues — or even to themselves.