 Hello everyone welcome this is our seventh lecture of the spring series unbelievable how fast time is gone and I think spring is actually coming yay so I'd love to ask Michael or landscape our program committee now to please introduce today's speaker Michael. Thank you Carol and good afternoon to everyone. Today we're very pleased to welcome Dr. Melissa Willard Foster. She's an associate professor of political science at the University of Vermont. Professor Willard Foster earned her undergraduate degree at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Washington DC, a master of arts in international relations at the University of Chicago and her PhD at the University of California Los Angeles UCLA focusing on international relations quantitative methods and comparative politics. At the Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Melissa held a fellowship at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. At UVM she teaches classes on international relations, international security, and foreign military intervention among other topics. She's had a long-standing interest in the causes of international conflict. One of her many publications is the recent book toppling foreign governments the logic of regime change published by the prestigious University of Pennsylvania Press. Professor Willard Foster grew up in Rentham, Massachusetts and has lived in many other places including the Czech Republic and Japan where she worked as an English teacher. Now that she's glad to be back in New England she enjoys hiking, jogging, skiing, and kayaking whenever time permits. The title of today's lecture is Promises Promises. Do presidents keep their foreign policy campaign pledges? To help us answer that timely and provocative question please join me in welcoming Professor Melissa Willard Foster. Thank you so much Dr. Erlanski. I appreciate that kind introduction. I am going to share for you my screen here in just a second bring up my presentation for you. If you would bear with me while I get the technology up and running. Okay, I'm going to assume everybody can see my screen. This is a little bit like my classes where I wait for somebody to interrupt me and signal me if the technology isn't working. But thank you again Dr. Erlanski for that kind introduction. Thank you to Triple E for your invitation. I'm so pleased that you're interested in my research and I think it's timely and I hope you will as well. I thought by way of introduction I would tell you a little bit about how I came around to this project because this is still a very new project for me so I have to start with the caveat that there's still a lot that I don't know. There's a lot I won't be, a lot of questions I won't be able to answer today but a lot I hope to sort of provide you my initial insight on. So the idea for this book actually came to me in late 2016, early 2017 because around that time I was finishing up my first book Toppling Foreign Governments which as you heard in the introduction is a book that examines the why countries overthrow foreign governments. And one of the findings that came out of that book was just how common the practice of foreign and post-regime change is certainly in terms of U.S. foreign policy. And when I found that pretty much going back to Franklin Roosevelt every president saved Gerald Ford who perhaps was not in office long enough had undertaken some form of foreign and post-regime change whether it was a covert action like the 1954 CIA overthrow of the Guatemalan president or an indirect operation where funds or weapons were given to insurgent groups so you might think of the Bay of Pigs invasion or Reagan's support for the Contras or whether it was a military invasion that we see more recently in Iraq and Afghanistan. Foreign and post-regime change is a remarkably common policy in U.S. foreign policy. But what stood out to me most is that even when presidents had campaigned against it we still saw them undertaking it. So the most noteworthy example of this of course is George W. Bush who as a candidate in the 2000 election said during his second presidential debate I quote, I just don't think it's the role of the United States to walk into a country and say we do it this way so should you. I think what we need to do is convince people who live in the lands they live in to build the nations. Of course Bush goes on to launch two of the largest nation building projects since World War II in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the more I thought about this the more I could think of examples where Bush was not the only president to go back on his campaign promise. For example Dwight Eisenhower campaigned on a policy of rollback. Rollback was essentially was about foreign and post-regime change. It was about rolling back communist governments overturning overthrowing communist governments. It was an incredibly popular campaign pledge. But Eisenhower didn't really believe in it and in fact once he was in office he conducted a policy review and the policy review to no one's surprise showed rollback was going to be too costly was going to raise the risk of war. And so Eisenhower ends up basically backing containment which was the policy he had criticized during the election. Lyndon Johnson famously promises to not increase American involvement in Vietnam. In fact during the 1964 election he's quoted as saying we're not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves. And Johnson is the president that significantly increases U.S. involvement in Vietnam and it's just the following year that he sends 3,500 Marines to Vietnam. Even Jimmy Carter. Carter runs on a campaign to revise American foreign policy to keep it in line with American values and the promotion specifically of human rights. And he promises not to be giving U.S. foreign aid to countries to governments that violate human rights. And by and large he does fulfill that pledge but there are some notable exceptions. So one of those is in the Congo or Mobutu Sesse Seco known to his regime is known to commit gross human rights abuses but is yet receiving vast sums of U.S. foreign aid. Reagan promises not to negotiate with terrorists but that's exactly what he does in order to get the release of U.S. hostages held in Lebanon by Iranian backed terrorist groups. And this effort to release these hostages is what will ultimately to the Iran Contra affair. And President Obama promised to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay where detainees were being held from the global war on terror and this was a promise he was ultimately unable to fulfill. So if all of this is sort of getting you to think along the lines I was thinking of at the time you might be saying of course presidents don't keep their promises don't they all lie you know aren't isn't this kind of what their program to do isn't what this is isn't this what the political game is about. And you know if that's what you're thinking you're in good company because studies show that by large the public does regard politicians as liars as not fulfilling their promises. But there's also some scholarly work to support this view this isn't just sort of the public perception there's scholarly work that also says that in fact you know presidents actually they don't intend to keep their promises. A lot of what you hear in campaigns is election rhetoric and it's aimed at winning the largest number of votes presidents can possibly obtain. So they don't really have they don't set out with this intention of courting to this particular theoretical perspective to to to fulfill their promises. In fact a famous American political scientist Elmer Eric Schatzneider said quote party platforms which are you know these are documents that are written up by the party that the president adopts and are filled with their pledges party platforms persuade no one deceive no one and enlighten no one. So according to this view there should be no expectation that presidents would ultimately keep these pledges that they make when they're candidates. But that's not the only perspective there is another perspective based on our models of political representation that says in fact presidents have a strong incentive to keep their pledges and this is because voters engage in what is called retrospective voting. And retrospective voting simply means that when voters go to the polls they consider not only what are the policies that the candidate is promising but also how has the candidate performed on his or her previous promises or how has the party performed. And so this is something voters keep in mind oh is this is is there any reason to believe this this candidate is going to fulfill their promises well how have they done so far. So based on this this would tell us actually presidents have strong incentive to keep their promises because they know they're going to be judged on their record ultimately. So what does the empirical data say this is kind of what the theoretical perspectives and political science tell us they're they're they're somewhat unclear whether or not presidents we should expect presidents to keep their promises but what does the the data say once we look at pledges and fulfillment do we see a clear pattern. Well we actually don't have a lot of research on foreign policy pledges but there is a rich literature on domestic policy pledges and fulfillment. And so what you see here is a chart put together from data that was compiled by other political scientists who did a review of the literature on domestic policy pledge fulfillment. So these are pledges that relate purely to domestic policy health care tax reform education etc and the trend here is clear that actually presidents keep a majority of their campaign pledges. So in the left hand column this is the year in which the study was published the first one being 1968 the most recent being 2004 the middle column lists the time period that was under study and the right hand column indicates the percentage of campaign pledges that were kept and most of the studies consult party platforms when looking for campaign pledges. So as you can see the vast majority of these studies find that a majority of pledges are fulfilled. What about foreign policy? Well this we don't know because there's strikingly little work on foreign policy pledge fulfillment. We really don't know whether when it comes to foreign policy presidents are just as likely to keep their pledges as they are with domestic policy or whether they're less likely or even more likely. So on the one hand we might imagine that presidents actually are more likely to keep their foreign policy pledges than their domestic pledges and that's because there are fewer formal constraints on their foreign policy making power. So when I talk about formal constraints I mean institutional constraints enshrined in the constitution legal constraints. The constitution sets out certain powers for the executive the judicial legislative branch and foreign policy is the area where president actually has the most influence and this is why actually a lot of candidates run on domestic policy in order to get elected but then as presidents they're really remembered for their foreign policy and what they did or did not accomplish and that's because that's the area which they tend to have more freedom of action. But on the other hand there are quite a few obstacles that presidents encounter in foreign policy making some of these are similar obstacles that they face in domestic policy making and some of them are new obstacles so for example informal constraints these arise with domestic policy as well bureaucratic actors interest groups the media even a public opinion could influence the kind of foreign policies the president is able to enact bureaucrats in particular when it comes to foreign policy can have a lot of influence and this is because a lot of our presidents don't have a lot of foreign policy experience to draw on. Many of them served as governors have limited foreign policy knowledge and so once in office they tend to rely heavily on the bureaucracy for information for policy options and so bureaucrats can influence the process along the way by limiting the menu of options the president could choose from by choosing what information to emphasize what information to de-emphasize by leaking information to the press to either raise the profile of a particular policy or critique a particular policy. So there are various ways along the policy making process where informal actors can exert some control but unlike with domestic policy presidents also face some international constraints when it comes to foreign policy making because if they're making promises that depend on the cooperation their allies and their allies decide not to cooperate well then that's going to obviously impair the president's ability to fulfill a promise but it's not just allies that presidents have to consider foreign rivals and enemies may take action that preempt a president from fulfilling a promise made during the campaign. So international constraints are something that that really could form an obstacle to a president who's trying to enact a new foreign policy. Lastly as I said before presidential candidates often don't have a lot of experience in foreign policy and so not only does that mean that they're more reliant on bureaucrats once they're in office but also as candidates they might be more likely to make promises that are infeasible and practical just promises that ultimately they're not going to be able to keep. So these are the reasons why we might imagine foreign policy might actually be difficult or rather foreign policy pledges might be difficult to fulfill. So this is a focus of my new book this question do presidents keep their foreign policy pledges. I'm curious about understanding what the record looks like so my hope is to collect data on president's pledges and to look at the fulfillment of those pledges see how well they've done does how does foreign policy end up comparing to domestic policy. So as I said I'm still at the beginning of this project so I hope one day maybe I could come back and and show you the results so once the project is complete but that may still be a way off but at this stage I do have some initial results that I can show you. So in my research I am looking at various areas for campaign pledges related to foreign policy so what is a pledge. This is a definition that I borrowed from the literature on domestic policy pledge fulfillment and this literature adopts one definition of a pledge so multiple scholars adopt this definition they define a pledge as a statement committing a party to one specific action or outcome that can be clearly determined to have occurred or not. So this is what I'm looking for now where do I look for there are various areas where pledges might appear. One campaign materials and speeches so this is a rich source for very specific pledges. Two party platforms as I said previously each of the the two major parties in the US political system adopts a party platform every presidential election with I should note the exception of the most recent election the Republican Party chose not to adopt a platform for the first time in history that I know of and instead simply chose to back President Trump but most election years the the two parties concoct a platform and those platforms are mainly written by party elites so they're not necessarily written by the president which makes them a little less ideal as a source for pledges but every presidential candidate with the exception of Bob Dole various reasons have chosen to adopt the party platform so most presidential candidates will say yes I agree with this platform and and these are the policies that represent my agenda and so to that extent they do represent what the president is promising they're also very helpful because they provide sort of a consistent source for for pledges so with campaign materials and speeches a lot of the pledges that we we will gather will kind of depend on how many materials are out there or how many speeches are out there the party platform is just one consistent document that we have for every election going back to 1952 that specifies pledges so it allows for this sort of uniformity when examining pledge making over over a long period of time the third source are presidential debates now these like party platforms like campaign materials and speeches they have their pluses they have their minuses the the positive thing about presidential debates is that they're widely publicized this is what the american public hears so when we think about whether or not voters think presidents keep their pledges a lot of what voters are going to be judging the president on are the pledges that are made during these these televised debates the downside about presidential debates are twofold first there are not always presidential debates there are some election years in which there have been no presidential debates nixon for example chose after his defeat to kennedy chose decided he was not going to go through the the televised debate process again so we do have some election years where there are no presidential debates another shortcoming is is there more informal the president is speaking off the cuff so the president may you know stumble over words or say things somewhat imprecisely in ways he or someday she may not necessarily mean so um so for all of these there are sort of positives and negatives but i hope to get a complete picture of what are the kind of pledges each president has made as a candidate through looking at these three sources all right so now i can show you some of my initial data so with the help of a couple of research assistants i've gone through the platforms the party platforms of every president um and actually also his opponent um although i i i've just showing you here the results for the presidential the winner of the election this graph shows you the number of pledges that appear in the platforms of each of the presidential candidates that goes on to win the presidency um and as you can see some of them are are quite verbose uh have made quite a number of pledges obama who i'm currently in the midst of of coding fulfillment for obama uh that's 191 pledges um that we have to go through and and figure out whether or not he he was able to carry them out um reagan though is the winner with 199 pledges in the 1980 election so some of these you know are brief and and uh johnson only made 29 eisenhower in his first election 22 some of them are going to require quite a bit of work to code whether or not the president fulfilled his promises so this is where i'm at in terms of party platforms i have not been able to collect much data on campaign materials and speeches yet so i don't have anything to show you on that however i have collected pledges for two presidential debates obama's first term in office the 2008 election and trump's first term in office the 2016 election so i coded pledges in those debates and i was also able to code fulfillment so what this graph shows you is that in fact both presidents had fulfilled a majority of their promises now in hindsight if i could re-correct the re-create this graph i would have put trump in red and obama in blue because that would have better aligned with their party affiliation but my apologies trump is in blue and and obama's in red but what i want to focus your attention on is just this large you know these tall bars here under the fulfilled category these are the number of pledges um on the very far left hand column are the is the cumulative number of pledges um and the vast majority of them do go fulfilled a few are mostly fulfilled meaning you know pretty much they're fulfilled but i can't they don't quite pass the bar so one example is is obama promises to withdraw troops um actually yes he promises to withdraw combat brigades from iraq by within 16 months and he does it within like 18 months so that's a pledge fulfillment that goes in the mostly fulfilled category partially fulfilled means well there was some progress made clearly the the president made an effort here but either he was blocked he faced some obstacles that that he couldn't overcome or you know maybe he lost interest we we don't know we don't really see additional action to get full fulfillment and then there are a few pledges that go unfulfilled here now there's something i want to stress here um because this this is still a very incomplete picture as long as i don't have campaign materials and speeches and the reason why is is sort of best explained by way of example and that is trump's promise about the border so in the 2016 debate trump pledges to strengthen the border with mexico so he talks about building a strong border we need to strengthen the border but he never says what he says elsewhere which is that he's going to build a wall and he's going to get mexico to pay for it so that pledge goes unfulfilled he is not successful in getting mexico to build a wall and in fact even building the wall you know there's a little bit of hedging here on whether how much of the wall is actually new wall um but when we talk about when we look at fulfillment for what he actually said in the debate which was that he is going to strengthen the border on that mark you know if that's the bar he has to cross well it's clear he does take policy action towards strengthening the border making it the obstacles to crossing the border much more difficult so that's why ultimately i really would like to have pledges from these three primary sources campaign materials and speeches debates and party platforms so i can really get a fuller picture of what the actual pledge is um and and how it looks in its various forms okay so this brings me back to this question that i posed here at the beginning are our politicians dishonest well are we as a public if that's what we think are we wrong politicians actually much more trustworthy much more credible than they than we give them credit for maybe so and maybe not there's reasons to believe that why what you hear in a campaign might not ultimately match up with what you get as policy so consider this when presidents make their pledges they make two types of pledges broad pledges but also narrow pledges and what i've noticed in in my assessment of of the data is at least the sort of first initial assessment as presidents are more likely to fulfill these broad pledges than they are narrow pledges now what do i mean by broad versus narrow i'll give you an example so in the 2008 election um season obama promised to send two additional combat brigades to afghanistan so this is a narrow pledge because it's something that's very specific it's very clear what he's talking about and it's very clear for me as a researcher to decide did he do this or did he not do this a broad pledge is exactly as stated it's broad there's an example uh that obama a pledge that obama makes um is we will focus on building up our special forces what makes this broad is that obama could fulfill this pledge in a number of ways so even though it counts as a pledge he's pledging to take an action it's not clear what that action is going to be is it going to be grading greater funding for special forces is it going to be more deployment of special forces um what is you know focusing on building up mean that's something that's left for the researcher to interpret but it also provides a little wiggle room for candidates so that you know if they take some sort of action towards this goal it's going to count as fulfillment even though what the public may hear and what the public may anticipate will be something much more so you know perhaps the public is anticipating he's going to be sending out special forces everywhere where in fact all he's done is you know maybe did some additional training he actually does increase reliance on special forces though i should know another type of uh pledge that we see that is more common to be fulfilled are hold on for a second action pledges so just as there are broad and pledges and narrow pledges we have action pledges and outcome pledges and action pledges do appear easier to fulfill i'll give you an example so in the 2016 election trump makes an outcome pledge he says we're bringing GDP growth up from one percent up to four percent this is pretty big pledge and ultimately he does not um fulfill it but it is an example of an outcome pledge so it is promising a specific outcome now an action pledge is sort of requires the president to pass a lower bar simply requires the president to take action towards a certain goal so for example one one action pledge that trump makes is i'm going to renegotiate NAFTA so in terms of what the public hears they may be expecting okay president's going to renegotiate NAFTA and that's going to have a certain outcome so voters may be focused on the outcome but when in fact if we look at the specific pledge the president has only promised to take action towards that outcome so that is one way what that's one reason why presidents may appear to fulfill the majority of their promises but that's not the impression that voters have one more reason why what voters here might not be exactly what they get in terms of policy is that a lot of the the promises in party platforms and debates and campaign materials are actually many of them refer to pretty minor things things that most voters probably are not following very closely whereas the promises that are more likely to be broken are probably the kind of issues the kind of problems that the public is paying attention to so these major promises may be more likely to be broken now this is still a hypothetical for me i haven't been able to test it yet but it is a hypothesis i i do hope to test eventually and my suspicion here is that a lot of these major promises get broken because they involve intractable problems problems that perhaps be doubled the previous administration and are still around for the incoming administration who's also going to struggle with them and these intractable problems often are intractable because there are a lot of obstacles to change there's a lot of obstacles to fixing them so presidents may encounter some of these obstacles as they try to carry out their pledges and these obstacles can ultimately undermine their efforts to fulfill a pledge so what are some of these obstacles that presidents face when it comes to fulfilling their promises well i have classified the kind of obstacles i've come across in my research according to four different types and these are based on whether or not the constraint the or obstacle the president face is a formal one or an informal one or whether or not it's coming from a domestic source or an international source so let me tell you a little bit more about these a domestic constraint that is also a formal constraint are the kind that are enshrined in the constitution the constitution gives certain powers to the executive branch and the legislative branch and the judicial branch when it comes to foreign policy making congress and the supreme court have less power in a lot of ways than the president to affect foreign policy making but they still have power so for example congress controls the purse and congress can decide whether or not to fund some of the president's foreign policy pledges this is a problem obama had to consider when it came to increasing troops in afghanistan he was pretty confident that republicans would support what became came to be known as the afghan surge but he wasn't sure that his own party would support it because there was a lot of skepticism among democrats in congress about whether or not it was going to be worth the money the supreme court has rarely interfered with foreign policy and foreign policy decisions there's been a couple of notable exceptions but by and large the supreme court although it does have the power if a case were to come before it generally does not interfere but the president's predecessor could also influence his or her menu of options presidents sometimes when they're leaving office anticipate the kind of policies their their successor might adopt and may try to shift policies in ways that they want or perhaps limit the new incoming president's range of options this is something that george hw bush did with respect to bill clinton coming into office george hw bush anticipated that clinton would bring the united states into the war in bosnia and at the time there was a war going on in bosnia that involved gross human rights atrocities but there was also a disastrous famine in samalia and bush really thought that the samalia crisis would be easier for the united states to intervene in um less likely to lead us down into the uh you know a vermont oh sorry vietnam style engagement so he commits troops to um to do a humanitarian intervention in samalia partly and i was stressed partly to preempt clinton from bringing the united states into bosnia which ultimately as part of nato the we do intervene but that's much later all right informal constraints as i mentioned before bureaucrats can exercise a lot of influence in the fall the policymaking process as can interest groups and their lobbyists who you know may work together to rally public opinion by using the media for or against certain types of policies presidents may also face constraints from international or foreign actors and these could also be both formal or informal so formal in the sense that the united states is a member of certain international institutions or has committed itself to certain international treaties and so we have certain obligations as a result of membership in these institutions or our commitment to these treaties informal constraints that come from the international realm these can come from our allies who may or may not be willing to cooperate with the president's policies they can come from our rivals who may preempt the president from enacting certain policies or they could come from third parties terrorist organizations who could undertake action that dramatically shifts the president's course 9 11 many people argue really changed president bush's foreign policy his foreign policy pre 9 11 and post 9 11 some scholars argue almost looks like two different presidents okay i'm going to give you some more examples of each of these with the exception of one uh the international formal constraints and the reason for that is there's there's not a lot of great examples of these because um the united states is very selective in terms of the international commitments it makes and part of the reason is because the presidents don't want to be constrained by international organizations so we have fewer examples of these okay what are some examples of a domestic formal constraint well all of these examples are going to give you are from obama's first term in office because this is kind of where i i have my attention right now where my research is is taking me so um obama promises to close the detention camp in guantanamo bay in the 2008 election debate how does he perform on this well as i said earlier he's unable to fulfill this promise why why is this promise not fulfilled well here we really see the influence of domestic formal constraints congress blocks the funding to transport prisoners from guantanamo bay to the united states so this effectively makes it possible impossible for him to do this now while this promise was actually pretty popular among democrats um when it came down to making the decision about where these detainees were going to be moved to there was a lot of pressure on local members members of congress senators look we don't want these these terrorists in our in our backyard so this is why you know congress as a collective was was pretty opposed to to allowing obama to close guantanamo but that wasn't just this a lot of the detainees actually were able to to file um uh complaints because many of them were held without habeas corpus so they they were held without evidence without right to an attorney and based on this a lot of them were were granted their their freedom by lower american courts however the dc circuit court which was saft uh with more conservative judges overturned most of these decisions um so these these detainees were ultimately forced to stay um the other category of prisoner that obama runs into difficulty with are these forever prisoners and these are the prisoners that really you know the evidence indicates they're just too dangerous that if you let them go there's a high probability that they're going to initiate a terrorist attack on the united states um i should note there's actually an international element to this uh this example obama does try to transfer some detainees to other countries and he faces two problems one is a lot of their home countries are too unstable for him to transfer them to so if he did this he risks them them disappearing and rejoining their terrorist organizations if indeed that that's what they plan to do the other problem is um some countries are are willing to take the detainees but they want payment they expect something in return and and some of the demands are just too great for obama to say yes to but to paint this uh this this pledge as a complete failure would be a bit misleading because he does have some set success in reducing the population so when he comes in to office um there are 242 detainees in guantanamo bay by the time he leaves office there's only 41 okay a domestic informal constraint on pledge facilities what is an example of um domestic actors who have informal power on the policy making process well obama talks about during the campaign a lot about the danger that chemical facilities pose in the in in the united states so a lot of these chemical facilities lack um security measures that would keep them safe that would prevent terrorists from infiltrating them and using them to create some sort of habit so he says in the debate we've got to make sure that we're hardening our chemical sites but interestingly he actually does not ultimately take action on this until his second term in 2013 after a west texas fertilizer plant explodes and kills 15 people and injures hundreds and it's only after this that he actually you do see some movement on this pledge so the question is why do we see him do so little here well there is an initial effort to require a lot of these chemical plants to um submit you know who's working for them and to have the government run background checks on them and this gets blocked because of interest group pressure namely mainly from the industry industry groups who are opposed to the additional paperwork and who say it's going to be too costly for them but labor and environmental groups aren't terribly happy either because they want um they want more effective legislation they they're not happy that they think that what he's proposing doesn't go far enough they want a more effective plan okay my last example of an international constraint a constraint that's coming from the international realm but is informal in nature um is relates to the war in afghanistan and a pernicious problem when it comes to the war in afghanistan is afghanistan's production of poppy um which ultimately goes to produce opium so obama during the 2008 campaign high lysis says we've got to deal with this it's a major problem it's uh the taliban is using profits from the poppy trade to to profit and to uh run its insurgency so we have to take care of this but he can't ultimately and a major reason of that is because the afghan economy is reliant on poppy production and i couldn't have found a better quote really to speak to this this is the former director of a a state department group that's tasked with um you know dealing with this problem and he says urging karzai who is the afghan president at the time to mount an effective counter narcotics campaign was like asking an american president to halt all u.s economic activity west of the Mississippi i.e. it's just not going to happen okay so in summary i just to conclude um do presidents keep their foreign policy pledges my initial results say yes but i do want to caution that those results are incomplete but at this stage um of the game it does seem that what i'm finding is compatible with the research on domestic policy pledge fulfillment will pledges match reality well that's that's probably unlikely as far as what voters here being what they get because the pledges that tend to get fulfilled are ones that are somewhat easier for presidents to keep it's the bigger pledges that um involve bigger obstacles that voters are more likely to be paying attention to those are the ones that are probably less likely to be kept what are some of the obstacles presidents face well i've talked about both informal and formal constraints as well as domestic and international constraints that can arise um when it comes to fulfilling presidential promises so where do i hope to go from here well as you can see the road ahead is long but i i'm eager for the challenge um i am intending to complete uh fulfillment the fulfillment data uh within the next year is my goal uh to look at whether or not presidents have kept their um their pledges in those platforms that i showed you earlier and i hope to be able to compare pledges across sources too uh the pledges that appear in campaign material so pledges that appear in debates the pledges that appear in party platforms and i think this is important because a pledge can take different forms in those venues so i really want to kind of try to get the pledge that really um it sort of best exemplifies what voters are paying attention to some additional questions i hope to answer are which of those obstacles i talked about are the most common for presidents to encounter are bureaucrats really their biggest problem are interest groups really their biggest problem or is it really our allies and international actors that are ultimately why presidents run into problems trying to implement their foreign policy how long does it take for presidents to fill fill their pledges we have this understanding that presidents try to get as much as they can done in their first 100 days but there's also an expectation that perhaps in the last year and they're in office just before their re-election they might have incentive to try and make good on a lot of those promises and finally i'd like to look at other causes of pledge fulfillment so the domestic policy pledge data talks a lot about economic conditions when those are good presidents might be better able to fulfill their problems promises when they have rich experience or a longer time in office these things could increase pledge fulfillment so i'm going to end there i want to thank you all so much for your attention and i look forward to taking your questions i'll go ahead and i see we have some here in the q&a um and if you give me a second while i sort of look quickly at at the question um i'll i'll be happy to answer it so my first question here uh says it seems president biden didn't make too many foreign policy pledges just wondering what can be made of his foreign policy goals based on his pick of tony blinkin and their interactions between blinkin and the chinese as well as biden and putin the past few days yes a great question in terms of biden's foreign policy pledges uh i don't have um i haven't yet coded the pledges made in the 2020 election and i started to and then i discovered that there was no republican party platform for the 2020 election it's the first time in history the republican party decided it would just throw its support to trump and and do what trump uh and back whatever trump's policy promises were um so i don't have them for the 2020 election so i can't say for sure whether or not uh he didn't make many foreign policy goals um i will say that foreign policy tends to matter less than domestic policy in elections so which is why i think it's very common for voters to really kind of walk away with this impression of well i'm hearing more on domestic policy and not so much for foreign policy and the exceptions tend to only be if the country is undergoing a war or if there's some sort of major security threat um or or if foreign policy has sort of captured america's attention as it did you know in the bush years with what happened in iraq and afghanistan so in the 2008 election foreign policy actually did have a lot of impact this most recent election i think with the pandemic domestic policy was really the focus in terms of blinkin and and his views you know blinkin's been around a long time he advised biden when biden was vice president the two of them share a lot of views and you know i honestly see that somewhat as a disadvantage i think um populating your your cabinet with folks who may not agree with you is a good thing um and it's really important to call that those differences in opinion um but certainly in these last few days we're we're definitely seeing biden take a clearly more forceful approach to russia in particular um then then then did trump um or putin in particular than that did trump um but but you know biden is also continuing trump's sort of way of interacting with china which is to see it as a threat um why didn't bob dole adopt his party platform i you know i read up on it and i wish i could tell you in detail now um but i seem to recall he's he's he's saying pretty much what a lot of people know which is that this is a document written by party elites that it doesn't really necessarily represent um you know what i intend to do so i wish i could give you a more detailed answer on that because it's been some time since i looked at his reasons for that but but i do recall that him rejecting it is is not sort of emblematic of his his campaign um let me just scroll a couple of more well what kind of resources um could i use to look at the pledges of somebody like george washington and um what kind of resources would i be able to use uh to see if those pledges are kept um i would love to be able to to research for my research to go that back that far um i think i'm already i've got perhaps possibly too ambitious of a plan to even just go back to eisenhower um considering that some of the the presidential candidates here and their platforms have nearly 200 promises that i will have to find pledge fulfillment data on so um that would be very difficult i imagine there might be you know um retrospectives of foreign policy that i could consult to see if major promises were kept um but i don't want to focus on just major promises because if major promises are more likely to be broken then um it would give us an incomplete view because even though voters may care more about major promises i think it's pretty interesting that on these more minor things which voters might not be paying attention to but may nevertheless have a significant impact on the way the world works that on those issues that presidents are more likely to fulfill their promises um oh my resources for looking at fulfillment that's a great question um so so far i'm looking at obama's first term this is where i've done most of my work um and i am getting a leg up on this because uh there's a website politico who has researchers uh and they've been researching pledge fulfillment by both trump and obama now they don't go beyond um trump and obama which i plan to do they're also using exclusively campaign materials and speeches so um they that when you do that it leaves open the possibility that you're somewhat cherry picking um pledges rather than kind of looking at the whole span of pledges so that's why i'm looking at platforms and debates as well but in terms of looking at fulfillment this has actually been really helpful because they're they're reporting um and their sources are very good they often consult experts but where they have not uh done any research on some of the pledges i've come across i've been able to use various sources um just you know news articles have been very helpful um congressional reports as a congressional research service which uh congressional reports that um you know bring sort of tell you the history and bring you up to date on certain policies um so so far i've been able to track a lot of these uh some of them you know tell i've i've been reading a lot of books about the war in afghanistan obama's policy in afghanistan that has really sort of also helped me judge those promises um i see a lot of interest in the in the bob dole and why question about why bob dole didn't adopt his party's platform and i regret that i can't tell you more detail on that um just a second as i i read another question here um so i have a question um does the population vote with promises in mind those capped versus not capped it seems that trump would have or maybe would not have been elected whatever promises he kept or not so this is a great question and it goes back to these debates we have in um in in the discipline about whether or not presidents really have any intention to keep their promises and there is a body of research that says exactly what your your question somewhat implies which is a lot of what's set in campaigns is really just meant to win votes um i'm actually reading obama's book promise land and and he talks about how he's learned on the campaign trail that voters don't care about his eight-point plan for whatever such you know policy initiative they just they they want to hear you know his values what does he represent um and so you know there's this understanding that a lot of voters base vote based on their values rather than on their interests and so if voters are voting based on their values then they're really they're kind of picking up on retoric and they're not necessarily looking at each pledge and judging it on the likelihood that it'll be fulfilled but that's just one scholarly perspective there's this other perspective for which you know uh in discussions of political representation is sort of one of the major schools of thought which says that presidents understand or politicians understand they're going to be um judged on their record and because they need to worry about their record they they really have this intention to keep a lot of these promises that they're making so you know whether or not voters actually do truly care about these promises it is interesting to know that uh certainly with domestic policy and it appears quite possibly with foreign policy that that presidents do try to keep these promises um for fear that they will be judged if they don't okay i believe there might be some more here okay um yes there are some other questions here let me figure out how to get to them apologies i feel i i'm seeing that chat which i believe has okay here they are thank you um let me um let's see all the persons shown in your graph um except perhaps eisenhower made more pledges in their second term than in their first you have any theories on why this is the case that's a great question um you know there's something interesting i noticed in uh presidential platforms and that is yes that there are actually an increase in pledges in the second term but a lot of these pledges are what we call status quo pledges so that means the wording is something along the lines of we will continue to we will maintain such and such a policy um a lot of the platform sort of um you know is sort of blowing the horn of what the president has done you know uh there's a bit of cheerleading going on uh in the platform celebrating the president's accomplishments um and so that is uh to some extent a lot of those pledges are what we call status quo pledges and status quo pledges are also believed to be easier to fulfill because it's easier to maintain the status quo than it is to change it now why there would necessarily be more pledges in the second term you know one thought that comes to mind is simply presidents get a little bit more confident they have the experience now of having been in office they have uh experience in terms of policymaking writ large but also foreign policymaking so perhaps that might give them a little bit more confidence to to make more pledges in the second term um i have a question here about are there any patterns in terms of which types of promises g.o.p presidents keep versus those democratic presidents keep um you know i i don't have enough data on that to answer that conclusively when i looked at my platform promises i did try to look to see if there were any patterns that could distinguish democrats from republicans and i did not find any clear patterns uh in terms of the number of pledges we had you know reagan with nearly 200 pledges but then we had obama with 191 pledges hillary clinton who you know doesn't go on to to win the election her platform also had over 190 pledges so um we do have some presence with just a lot of pledges some with with very few uh and it didn't seem to break down along party lines at all in terms of fulfillment i'm still at the beginning of the project um what i looked at in terms of obama and uh trump for their first terms um i did not see any patterns clear patterns yet in terms of which ones were more likely to be kept but this is actually a direction i hope to go in i'd like to see our security promises more difficult security promises are things that would relate to the use of the military or the national security interests of the united states um how do they compare to economic based pledges that may involve uh international trade for example um and how do those compare with diplomacy but based pledges that have to do with our interaction with other countries so um i'm coding the pledges as i go based on the issue area in which they fall and i'd like to see you know when we look at fulfillment do we see any clear patterns among those okay let me take a look here at some others and your view do presidential candidates sometimes make pledges threats or statements that are directed largely at foreign allies and adversaries might the main purpose be to convey a message to foreign leaders rather than an intent to fulfill a promise but that's really interesting idea um and i believe it's quite possible that we might see some elections where we see some promises of that nature one that comes to mind is is hillary clinton in the um 2016 election reassuring us allies that the united states was here to stay as as a leader um but like i said a lot of campaigns are directed at domestic policy because by and large that's what voters care about and that's where their focus is well i see carol here back on screen so i will wrap it up thank you so much for your attention i'm sorry if i didn't get a chance to your answer your question um hopefully one day i can come back when this is complete and give you a fuller picture oh melissa thank you so much this was very interesting we can't wait to hear more about your new book and be able to see it and hear about it so it's terrific thank you good luck with your research thank you very much thank you