What is the point of a party manifesto these days?

Party political manifestos may seem like an old fashioned method of electoral campaigning in the era of targeted digital adverts, but that might well be why they are still important.

Election time is almost upon us in Scotland and we’re already starting to see the various parties start to make their pitches to voters. Even though the official “campaign period” hasn’t yet started various parties – including the party of Government – have already started caveating their promises with “if we are elected”.

Some of this is certainly for the good, such as news that if the SNP are re-elected then they’ve promised to adopt Common Weal’s plan for a National Housing Agency. We’re already gearing up to hold their feet to the fire on that one and to try to ensure that they don’t water our plans down to homeopathic levels as they did with the Scottish National Investment Bank nor that they mess the thing up so badly that it ends up like the National Care Service.

Promises are just words though and we’re entering an electoral campaign where it feels like those words are going to mean less and less to fewer and fewer people. The electorate has fragmented into camps with very little crossover. Politicians are focusing more tightly on the little crossover that does occur. Advertising becomes ever more focused and targeted (to the point that I might be explicitly excluded by the online algorithms from seeing the advert that you have been targetted to see). And we have new threats rising in the form of AI that will mindlessly lie to you by design.

Amid all of that, it might be worth asking what is the point of a mainstay of election campaigning for decades now: the party election manifesto?

Every election, parties are expected to produce a document outlining their plans, priorities and policies should they get into office post-election or even should they merely get into Parliament and be in a position to influence government policy.

It’s important to note that these are not legally required documents nor are they binding contracts. The state of UK electoral law is that, barring very, very narrow circumstances, there is no requirement for a prospective politician to even tell you, the voter, the truth about their intentions in office. The only real legal requirement is that they do not misrepresent the character of themselves or another candidate for political gain (in 2015, Alistair Carmichael won a court case over his lying during an election campaign on the grounds that he never represented himself to voters as an honest person – perhaps this is a question to ask candidates in your next hustings).

And so in a similar vein, there’s no actual legal recourse if a party of Government starts throwing out the promises they made in order to win power – just look at the manifesto of Keir Starmer’s leadership campaign compared to what he’s actually done in office…

Party Manifestos can be tricky to track down sometimes. Over the last few elections, I’ve tried to collect them on my personal blog but as you’ll see if you try to download some of them on the most recent list, the parties often chuck them in the digital bin shortly after the election which means if you want to track down historical copies, it can mean having to trawl through digital archives like the Wayback Machine.

“Some manifestos have even been held back until after the first postal votes have been cast...This should be ethically unacceptable”

What they are though is a statement of intent, a business plan and a means of accountability. Just because we don’t have some kind of legal redress mechanism if politicians fail to live up to their policies, we do have a social means of redress. The largest is, of course, the election itself as parties can and should be judged not just on the manifesto they put forward to voters but the ones they put forward prior to this. They can and should be judged based on their previous performance on promises fulfilled and promises broken, especially if their excuses for the latter are lacking.

Another aspect of the importance of a manifesto is open transparency. It’s not enough for you, a party loyalist, to see what the party you’re loyal to is promising you. Everyone else has to be able to see it too. We live now in an area where political ideological bubbles can be digitally enforced.

You could well be on a list to be targeted by a political advert from some party or another. It might well be that I am on a list to not be targeted by that same advert. This means that if we meet and start discussing the politics that we’ve seen that week, we could be facing entirely different realities of what we think is important or not.

This problem is made even worse with the rise of AI and other forms of fake news and radicalising politics (see, for example, the trend of people putting out fake news about rising lawlessness in London specifically because they were being rewarded in advertising money for doing so).

By giving people some level of an equal baseline in terms of our political understanding then we can become more and better engaged with the politics and politicians courting our votes (especially when they are the ones lying to us). See Bill Johnston’s recent article on informed citizens here for more about how you can become a more deliberative democrat.

We don’t yet know when the party manifestos for the upcoming Scottish election will be published. There has been a somewhat disturbing trend in recent elections where the larger parties especially seem to be trying to be the last to publish their manifesto – possibly in an attempt to avoid scrutiny and accountability and possibly so that they can make last minute edits to outbid their rivals (or avoid a pitfall that their rivals have fallen into).

Some manifestos have even been held back until after the first postal votes have been cast which should be a major alarm sign for our democracy as this means that it’s possible that parties may not be solidifying their promises until after people have started casting their votes. This should be ethically unacceptable.

As the Scottish election campaign lands on us over the next 11 weeks, I’ll be once again collecting as many of the manifestos as I can so that they can be read in one place. I also plan to follow this article up specifically with a look at some of the major party manifestos to see what they actually managed to accomplish over this current Parliament compared to what they promised to do.

This isn’t just an exercise in helping you vote better (though it’ll certainly do that) but when politicians know that we can see right through them maybe they’ll stop acting like they have something to hide. And maybe then, we’ll start to see a few more of those promises actually turn into policy.