The Comparative Pledges Project (CPP) is an international network of researchers who study the promises that political parties make to citizens during election campaigns.
Campaign promises or election pledges are important to the functioning of representative democracy. By making pledges on the future direction of government policy during election campaigns, and fulfilling those pledges if elected to govern, parties link public opinion to public policies. Ensuring a strong connection between public opinion and government policies is a fundamental democratic ideal.
The Comparative Pledges Project (CPP) is an international network of researchers who study election pledges in a wide range of countries. CPP researchers coordinate their research practices, including how they identify and code pledges, to ensure that their findings are as comparable as possible across countries. The researchers identify election pledges based on a common definition of pledges that requires those commitments to be testable, and they assess whether those pledges are fulfilled or broken using similar standards of evidence.
Today, the CPP network connects more than 60 researchers who are studying election pledges in 16 countries around the world. The researchers have produced both detailed country studies and comparative studies that draw on the evidence from these individual studies. This website contains further information on relevant publications, ongoing projects and upcoming events.