A Preliminary Examination of Presidential Anticrime Promises

Abstract

Presidential candidates make many promises about crime control policies during a campaign. Once they are elected to office, do presidents follow through with their campaign promises about crime? Previous studies show that presidents tend to keep most of the promises that they make as candidates across a wide range of topics. However, a specific study of crime issues is heretofore lacking. Using a content analysis of campaign speeches, this article compares candidates' statements about crime control strategies to presidential crime policy since 1968 in order to discover whether one mirrors the other. Finding that fewer than half of the specific promises about crime policies were fulfilled by the presidents, the article posits that the general agenda of a campaign becomes the agenda of the presidency. It also shows that neither political party affiliation nor incumbency were factors that influenced the presidents' fulfillment of their anticrime promises. In general, anticrime promises were kept less often than campaign promises in other policy areas.

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