As U.S. President Donald Trump reaches his 100th day in office, the media, pundits and politicians continue to offer their analysis of his successes and failures thus far. Trump himself seems to have mixed views, calling the 100-day mark a “ridiculous standard” on Twitter, while exaggerating his administration’s accomplishments in recent speeches. But monitoring elected officials’ progress against their promises isn’t anything new or specific to the U.S., and track records are rarely great.
“It’s a constant that politicians make a bunch of claims and predictions in campaigns and only stick with some of them,” says Susan Stokes, a political scientist and professor at Yale University. “If fact, we don’t really want promises to be restrictive. In representative systems, we hire politicians to figure things out for the public” that isn’t always equipped to make the most-informed decisions.
Here’s a look at a few recently elected global leaders and how they’ve held up a bit beyond their 100 day marks.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Canada
Date in office: Nov. 4, 2015
Canada‘s Prime Minister Trudeau and his Liberal Party ran on a platform centered around building a strong middle class. Trudeau has had some of his best success in economic reform, according to TrudeauMeter, a nonpartisan, citizen-run tracker of the prime minister’s promises. During his nearly one and a half years in office so far, Trudeau has kept nearly 25 percent of economy-related promises, including cutting the tax rate on the middle income bracket and introducing a child benefit payment program. That compares to about a 20 percent success rate overall that covers promises in categories such as immigration, security and government. The website’s founder, Dom Bernard, writes that in a democracy, “our government truly is as good as we are,” adding that there is an opportunity to “come back to the roots of what living in a democratic society means.” Of the 224 promises made by Trudeau, citizens commented the most on the prime minister’s promise to welcome 25,000 Syrian refugees by the end of 2015. Marked as a broken promise on TrudeauMeter, that objective was reached two months behind schedule, in February 2016.
Prime Minister Theresa May in the U.K.
Date in office: July 13, 2016
Before resigning his post as prime minister in July 2016, David Cameron had achieved nearly 40 percent of the goals set out in his five-year plan just over a year earlier during the 2015 election, according to GovTracker. Part of his plan was a promise to hold a referendum on the U.K.‘s membership in the European Union, and while this promise may not have been the cornerstone to his platform, the vote to “Brexit” was enough for him to leave his post.
“Theoretically, in a parliamentary system, one would expect a candidate to be more tied to their party’s platform,” says political science professor Susan Stokes. “They can be ousted or given no confidence votes, and therefore the party has more leverage against them.” But that’s not always the case. When the U.K.’s current prime minister, Theresa May, swept into power with her Conservative Party, she upheld the promise to trigger Article 50, or begin the U.K.’s departure from the EU, by March 2017. But she also said in her campaign speech that she wouldn’t hold an election until 2020, a promise that was broken with her call for early elections this June.
President Mauricio Macri in Argentina
Date in office: Nov. 22, 2015
In a piece for the North American Congress in Latin America, political scientist Maria Esperanza Casullo notes that Macri’s success was a shock to Peronism and Argentina‘s recent history of a populist, center-left government. Macrimetro, a nonpartisan, citizen-run tracker similar to TrudeauMeter, lists 265 promises the recently elected president made in a campaign document with the pro-business Cambiemos coalition platform. The objectives cover four categories: Ending poverty, ending drug trafficking, uniting the country and developing a special infrastructure development plan for the northern region. But after more than a year in office, only 10 are marked as complete. Chequeado, a site that aims to verify claims made by politicians, narrowed Macri’s promises down to the 20 it deemed most important, and the outlook isn’t much better. Most of the promises marked incomplete or delayed are economy-related, including creating more jobs, reducing inflation to one digit and generating more 30-year mortgages.
“We want politicians to be trustworthy and we give them leeway that campaign promises are not a straightjacket or blueprint. But when they do have to change course drastically, they have to tell us why,” says Stokes. “It’s risky for politicians to change their promises because they often get held to account for those changes and they risk their chances of re-election.”
President Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines
Date in office: June 30, 2016
Less than one month after taking office, the Philippine Daily Inquirer noted that new President Rodrigo Duterte had made progress on nearly half of his campaign promises. Duterte’s tough stance on crime and corruption were major selling points during the election in the Philippines, a country that ranks in the bottom half of Transparency International’s corruption index. The focal points of his campaign retained top priority status during his early days in office, leaving hundreds of people involved in the drug trade dead and other promises around education reform and improvements to internet speed relatively untouched. After 100 days in office, Duterte’s net approval rating was at 64 percent, but his approach, including a “bloody war” against criminals, continued to draw criticism from international human rights groups.
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Read more about populism, elections and international relations on the U.S. News Best Countries site.
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World Leaders and the 100-Day Standard originally appeared on usnews.com
