How Pledge Performance Affects Voting

This chapter introduces the main theoretical concepts and provides theoretical arguments for why a government party’s election outcome is expected to depend on its pledge performance. This theory of retrospective pledge voting (RPV) offers an integrative perspective between different models on voting: it combines a prospective oriented approach emphasising the crucial role of preferential differences between parties for citizens’ vote decisions, and retrospective oriented approaches focussing on electoral sanctioning of government performance.