Following voters in the chain of representation: The important role of pre-election pledge awareness

Abstract Election pledges are fundamental for representative democracy, linking parties’ campaigns before elections with their behavior afterwards. Yet little is known about voters’ awareness of these pledges before elections and how this affects post-election awareness of pledge fulfillment. Triangulating between a rich set of panel and pooled cross-sectional survey data surrounding the 2019 Danish national election ( N = 10,322), we show that voters who were able to recognize and recall pledges before elections were more likely to be aware of their fulfillment status after the election. Furthermore, pre-election awareness mostly benefited people with less political interest, enabling these relatively disinterested voters to nevertheless hold parties accountable. These findings have important implications for our understanding of voters’ ability to make informed choices when they delegate power to parties at elections and hold them accountable afterwards.