We analyze citizens’ evaluations of the fulfillment of 36 pledges in Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Portugal, Sweden and the United States with the objective of establishing comparative standards by which single-country results can be measured (benchmarking). We find that citizens’ evaluations are generally accurate reflections of the actual pledge fulfillment performance by governments. However, citizens often arrive at accurate evaluations through the use of perceptual stereotypes that have little to do with factual observation. We also find that an increase in political knowledge does not decrease the impact of perceptual stereotypes, it even increases it under some circumstances. We conclude the paper with a discussion of what is required to acquire a better understanding of the limits of existing databases from which a truly comparative research agenda can be built for the future.

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