Which kind of political campaign messages do people perceive as election pledges?

Contrary to the popular notion of the pledge-breaking politician, research has revealed that governing political parties fulfill most of their pre-election pledges. This discrepancy between public perception and scientific findings could be the result of citizens' looser definition of election pledges. Thus, as citizens' assessment of pledge fulfillment (and with that their satisfaction with the governing parties) hinges on their understanding of election pledges, we examined citizens' perception of election pledges. Our experiment (N = 705) showed that citizens were more likely to perceive messages as pledges when they were articulated in binding versus less binding terms, but when they were vague as opposed to specific in terms of goals. Political attitudes also biased the understanding of election pledges, demonstrating that it is in the eye of the beholder which messages are considered to be election pledges.