Kishida shows Harris, Trump the fatal risk of empty political promises

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, if they are misleading, how much the voters care about it.

And in democracies, voters know they will have a chance at the next election to punish politicians for broken promises they care about. To that extent, voters are in a stronger position than customers – although customers, at least, can change suppliers next time if they don’t like what they have bought.

This summer, an interesting comparison is being played out between Japan and the United States about the effects of politicians’ promises:

• Prime Minister Fumio Kishida decided not to run for another term as Liberal Democrat Party 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 fulfill but presumably thinks she will not be punished for.

It is unlikely that a large percentage of Japanese voters – who numbered 1o5.3 million at the time of the last general election in 2021 – paid attention to 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, there is no doubt that when he had used this slogan a month earlier during his campaign to be elected as leader of the LDP, it had played an important role in positioning him in the minds of the approximately 1% of voters who are LDP members.

The positioning this slogan gave him was