Some political promises really need to stay empty
English original of column just published in Japanese by Nikkei Business, drawing lessons from outgoing Prime Minister Fumio Kishida's promises for Kamala Harris and Donald Trump
If politicians’ campaign promises were subject to the same sort of laws and scrutiny as commercial advertising, they would be in deep trouble. Luckily for them, it is voters rather than lawyers who assess whether promises are misleading, and how much they care about it. And in democracies, voters know they will have a chance to punish broken promises they care about at the next election. To that extent, voters are in a stronger position than customers, though customers can at least buy from a different supplier next time if they don’t like what they got.
This summer, an interesting comparison is being played out being Japan and the United States about the effects of politicians’ promises. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida decided not to run for another term as LDP leader in September as his public popularity ratings are so low, a fact that can be partly blamed on his broken economic promises. And Kamala Harris has entered the race against Donald Trump making promises about economic policy that she must know that she cannot fulfil, but presumably thinks she will not be punished for.
It is unlikely that many Japanese voters paid attention to Prime Minister Kishida’s promise to create “a new form of capitalism” in Japan. His promise was too abstract to impress ordinary members of the public. However, when he used this slogan during his campaign to be elected as leader of the LDP in 2021 there is no doubt that it played an important role in positioning him in the minds of LDP members.
The positioning this slogan gave him was as an innovator in terms of domestic economic policy, someone who could be seen as being somewhat on the left-wing side of politics in contrast to his more conservative predecessors, Shinzo Abe and Yoshihide Suga. He wanted to show continuity with Abe and Suga in foreign and security policy, so this more left-wing positioning on economic affairs allowed him to look as if he also could represent change.
By comparison with the average prime minister of recent decades, Kishida’s three years in office counts as quite long. However, by comparison with Abe’s nearly eight years from December 2012 until September 2020 it counts as short. Moreover, the fact that the LDP now has no clear or strong candidate to succeed him means that he should have stood a good chance of remaining prime minister for a further three years.
The fact that he instead chose to resign is generally blamed on his low public approval ratings, which are in turn often blamed on the financial scandals that have beset the LDP. Such scandals, however, should affect the party more than Kishida himself, as he has not been personally tainted. It is more likely that economic factors explain his low popularity, notably the fact that ordinary people’s incomes have grown more slowly during his premiership than prices, making them feel steadily worse off.
The emergence of inflation cannot really be blamed on Kishida. Instead, his key mistake may have been that he did not stop talking about “a new form of capitalism” once he had been elected party leader. He kept the slogan in the headlines by setting up committees and demanding reports on how to implement this promise. Whatever the committees’ answers, Kishida proved unable to put them into practice. And what the public sees is that “new capitalism” consists of wages being outpaced by prices, while the decline of the yen exchange rate has made overseas tourism harder to afford.
The lesson for Kamala Harris, or for her opponent Donald Trump if he should defeat her in the election, is that economic promises may serve a purpose in getting elected but they should then be dropped if they prove impossible to implement or, worse, are potentially harmful.
Harris has promised to act to ban something she calls “price-gouging”, by which she means retail outlets adding to inflation by making excessive profits; and she has promised to raise the tax on corporate profits too. The first of those ideas is meaningless in an open, free-market society like America: there is no chance that new laws or enforcement mechanisms could in practice detect and punish excess profits. The second could be carried out only with the consent of Congress, which unless the Democrats win an unexpectedly big victory in both houses is unlikely to be forthcoming.
The point of such promises, as with Trump’s pledge to impose tariffs on all imported manufactured goods [and his new pledge to set up an “efficiency commission” headed by a multi-billionaire, Elon Musk, supposedly to lower the general price level, which the tariffs would quite definitely raise], may be for the candidate to position themselves in a way they hope will find favour with voters: as a friend of working people, in Harris’s case; as an enemy of exploitative foreigners, in Trump’s case, for tariffs, but also as a rival friend of working people.
The hope must be that both learn the lesson of Fumio Kishida: make meaningless, impractical promises if you must, but do not keep shouting about them – or worse, trying to implement them – once you are in office. To do so could be fatal.
I take your point but they cannot make a manifesto as in UK since everything depends on congress. And what about the small pledges?
See my comment in FT:
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I wouldn’t criticize American politicians for scattered initiatives since they are a product of their system of elections.
Only a few states are “Battlegrounds”, where a miniscule number of voters can tip the balance. It makes perfect sense to use the obvious levers of influence: For or against fracking in Pennsylvania, tax free tips in Nevada, for or against Palestinians in Michigan and so on. The affected groups are so small that promises can easily be broken when the election is won.
Dropping the electoral college and select presidents based on the popular vote would be a big step for the Americans. Campaigning would have to be performed over the whole country. Current election advisers would be totally lost, a good thing.
Values, schmalues as Tom Lehrer said. Or something like it."