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This paper examines the political meaning and characteristics of the election pledges in the 2002 local government elections. This paper specifically tests the targets and contents of election pledges that were publicly made by the candidates running for the chief executive position of 16 local governments, and verifies the underlying cleavage structure through a factor analysis. The differences of election pledges are analyzed by party, ideological spectrum, urban-rural cleavage and the result of the election through a cross-table analysis, and the political implications are reviewed in accordance with the results of this analysis.
Unlike the stereotypical expectation that there is no difference among election pledges made by the candidates and that election pledges have no influence on the outcome of the election, this research identified four dimensions in the electoral pledges: political-life issue, growth-distribution, materialistic-nonmaterialistic issue, and post-materialistic issue. Behind each dimension, the existence of tension between two positions--one inclining toward growth and another toward distribution--was confirmed, which implicates that the ideological cleavage is also arising in local elections.
