How Much Do Voters Care About Broken Election Promises?
6 min read
Manifesto promises matter and Labour will face fierce criticism if it breaks any. But our research suggests delivering a feeling of change is even more important than campaign pledges.
Keir Starmer’s job might look a little easier today if he had made fewer promises in 2024.
If it weren’t for the election manifesto, the Prime Minister could raise taxes to rescue public services. He could pursue closer European trade ties if Donald Trump upends global commerce. He might feel less pressure to deliver an unprecedented turn-around on homebuilding or NHS waiting lists. But his government can only really be understood through the prism of its election pledges on tax, Europe, housing, health and the environment — and its battle to try and fulfill them all.
This government has made much of rebuilding public trust, and a broken promise erodes trust like little else. Human brains are wired to be more sensitive to betrayal than mere disappointment. By the time of the next election, it’ll be more than 40 years since George Bush Snr's fateful words, ‘read my lips, no new taxes’. But the fear that broken promises will bring about electoral humiliation is just as alive today.
On the face of it, promises do matter
Sixty-three per cent of UK adults say “the government must stick to the promises it made at the election, no matter what happens” rather than "do what they think is right, even if that means they don’t keep an election promise”. Forty-three per cent of UK adults agree that “I am someone who keeps a very close eye on whether politicians are keeping their promises to the public” (25 per cent disagree).
To understand more about how, and how far, Labour’s election promises matter to voters, Thinks Insight & Strategy surveyed 2,067 UK adults in late January. The study sought to understand firstly how clear the public is on what Labour promised in 2024, secondly how far the government should worry about breaking promises generally, and thirdly whether some promises are more important to some voters than others.
Our research found that people can't always distinguish between actual Labour manifesto pledges and plausible Labour pledges. Exposed to ten pledges (half of which were fake and half genuine), four of the five actual manifesto items were correctly identified by majorities of UK adults. The fifth — the pledge not to rejoin a customs union with the EU — was still correctly recognised by a clear plurality. However, many people also believed the fictional pledges were real, with fewer than 1 per cent correctly sorting all 10 pledges into real or fake.
That's not the end of the story. Academic research has found that the media covers broken promises much more extensively than kept ones, so we have to assume that if the government does go back on any of its election promises, most voters will find out.
Broken promises matter more to Labour’s opponents than its supporters
Broken promises matter to voters. In our poll, when people were shown hypothetical future headlines from 2028 — for example, of higher taxes, longer waiting lists, or fewer new homes — they reacted with significantly stronger negative feelings towards the Labour government if they were sure that a real promise had been broken.
Yet a deeper look at the data revealed something striking: the people most aware of Labour’s promises and most sensitive to failure were not Labour voters. They were those who backed the Conservatives or Reform in 2024. Like a landlord with an unwelcome tenant, these people were looking closely at the terms of their contract, ready to pounce on any evidence that might help them to evict.
Labour’s own 2024 voters showed a different attitude.
A sizeable proportion — 42 per cent — believed that governments should prioritise doing what is right over election promises. They didn’t like the prospect of widespread tax increases or a fossil-fueled electricity grid. But knowing that these represented broken promises didn’t make them dramatically more negative. On the other hand, if they knew that Labour had promised to reduce NHS waiting lists and increase homebuilding, they were significantly more frustrated by the prospect of longer waiting lists or fewer homes. Alongside waiting lists, the potential 2028 headline that generated the strongest negative response from this group was not linked to one of Labour’s genuine manifesto pledges at all— it was the threat of another cost-of-living crisis.
Keeping a promise is more complex and nuanced than a box-ticking exercise
The data suggests that plenty of people are poised to criticise the government if it reneges on its pledges. Failing to improve NHS waiting lists or housing will provoke backlash across the political spectrum. But when it comes to tax and green energy, it’s the substance, and not the promise, that’s the issue for Labour’s 2024 voters. In the case of a customs union with Europe, those voters might give ministers even more freedom to drop the manifesto stance.
At the election, PoliticsHome and Thinks Insight & Strategy’s 2024 ‘Election Diaries’ project showed voters were desperate for change — the word Labour echoed in its election slogan. They wanted to see the new government make an impact on issues that its predecessors had seemed powerless to influence: rising cost of living, an increasingly chaotic NHS, migration levels. While many recognise that the full effects of change take time, our post-election focus groups show growing doubts about whether change is happening, or will ever happen, at the scale and pace promised.
“I know I sound like a hypocrite, because I can't tell you what the promises are, but we need to feel the difference, it needs to impact on our lives. And we need to feel the benefits. It needs to resonate in our everyday lives, that ‘Oh, I know Labour are back’." — Laura, 2024 Labour voter, now undecided, Dudley
Not everyone who voted for this government in July is ready to vote Labour again today, but they do seem to have more trust in the party’s intentions, regardless of past promises. Perhaps for these 2024 voters, Labour isn’t a troublesome tenant but more like a newly hired employee. Of course, they want you to work your contracted hours and not steal from the stationary cupboard. But really, they want you to do the job they hired you to do: make change happen.
Ben Shimshon is Co-Founder and CEO of Thinks Insight & Strategy. Dr Steve Van Riel is Senior Strategy Director and Head of Trust Development at Edelman and author of The Fight For Trust, and writes here in a personal capacity.
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