Do governments keep their promises? An analysis of speeches from the throne

Political parties regularly make promises to the public about what they hope to accomplish if and when they are elected to office. Once in office, the winning party, usually via the executive branch, announces its agenda by delivering a “speech from the throne” or a “state of the union/nation” address in the legislature. To what extent are governments able to fulfill the promises they make in these speeches? To answer this question, we investigate the impact of three structural constraints on promise fulfillment over time—procedural (e.g., majority vs. minority configurations); informational (e.g., new vs. incumbent governments); and economic (economic recession)—using an original dataset drawn from Canadian speeches from the throne between 1962 and 2013. Our findings, which both challenge and confirm the findings of existing literature on promise fulfillment, suggest that only procedural and economic constraints matter.