Parliamentary Mandate Fulfilment. An automated approach to measuring congruence between the pre and post-electoral discourse of parties using word embeddings

Abstract

The idea that electoral competition, party promises and manifestos are important for how the representative behaviour of parties unfolds post-electorally is central to democratic theories of representation. Scholars of Party Mandate fulfilment have for long been focusing methodologically on the number of pre-electoral pledges parties in government manage to realize. This paper analyses existing research and its limitations and proposes a novel approach for mandate fulfilment, extending past research (both conceptually and methodologically) by looking at the extent to which the parliamentary discourse of parties matches their electoral discourse. It designs, tentatively validates and implements a novel measure of how similar is the pre and post-electoral rhetoric of parties by utilizing recent advances in computational linguistics and the diffusion of text analysis tools in the social sciences. It applies it on the Irish parliament and compares electoral manifesto data with post-electoral parliamentary data from 1997 to 2019.

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