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A Conservative Revolution?
A Conservative Revolution?
Electoral Change in Twenty-First-Century
Ireland
Edited by
Michael Marsh, David M. Farrell,
and Gail McElroy
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
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© Oxford University Press 2017
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First Edition published in 2017
Impression: 1
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Foreword
Michael Laver
political science profession. The first Irish National Election Study (INES) was
conducted in 2002 funded by an Irish government grant that was in turn co-
sponsored and triggered by a US-based funding agency, Atlantic Philanthro-
pies. Most developed democracies have deployed state-funded election studies
since the 1950s, but the founding of the INES, of which the 2007 and 2011
election studies are a continuation, was of course better late than never. We
now have a developing time series that systematically measures developments
in Irish politics and a growing body of data that allow Irish voters to be
compared with voters in many other developed democracies.
Substantively this is important, because Ireland is no cookie-cutter democ-
racy. For much of the post-war era, there was a bitter civil war in living
memory and a resulting fractious but intimate relationship with Britain, the
former colonial power. There was an effectively unilateral declaration of
independence resulting in a 1937 republican constitution written in close
consultation with the Catholic hierarchy. The single transferrable vote elect-
oral system, which few political scientists outside Ireland really understand,
incentivizes clientelist and parochial politics, as well as facilitating maverick
local independents who have on occasion held the balance of power in
government formation. There was substantial emigration of many of its
younger and more enterprising citizens. No wonder Irish politics was ‘pecu-
liar’ to Ireland, with vigorous competition, incomprehensible to most foreign-
ers, between two conservative parties with similar-looking economic policies
but deeply differing cultural traditions rooted in the civil war, and a social
democratic party that was tiny in European terms.
Much, however, has changed in recent years, at least arguably making Irish
politics less peculiar. The influence of the Catholic Church declined substan-
tially, not least because of a relentless series of abuse scandals. The birthrate fell
off a cliff, though remains relatively high by European standards, reducing
demographic pressures for emigration. Ireland joined the EU, enjoyed a Celtic
Tiger boom making it briefly one of the richest countries in Europe, and then
a deep bust during the world financial crisis, requiring a bailout and the tem-
porary ceding of substantial financial autonomy to a troika of external powers
(the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission, and the Euro-
pean Central Bank). Fortunately, the political implications of at least some of
these developments were charted by the INES, culminating in the subject of
this book, the post-bust, dramatic, and arguably ‘realigning’ election of 2011.
We should be very thankful we have a ‘proper’ election study, not just a pot-
pourri of opinion polls, to help us navigate this important intellectual territory.
Self-evidently given the date of publication, this is not an ‘instant’ book on
the 2011 election—How Ireland Voted 2011 (Palgrave 2011) has done a very
good job of that already. The book that follows here is the keeper, the main-
stream contribution, by many of the most accomplished and respected
vi
Foreword
academics working on Irish politics, which deploys the 2002–11 Irish National
Election Studies to provide systemic scientific answers to many of the key
questions about this important election. This takes time, because the need is
not to do it fast but to get it right, and to provide a long-standing contribution
to the professional literature. This is a book that will be read and cited for
decades to come.
vii
Editors’ Preface
For two of the editors there was a second motivation guiding this project.
Michael Marsh was the main driving force behind the initiative to establish an
Irish National Election Study in the first instance and to ensure the continu-
ation of the series—sometimes, but not always, with the support of the Irish
Research Council (or its predecessor operations). But for Michael Marsh’s
efforts Ireland would not have developed this ‘gold standard’ of election
survey data referred to by Michael Laver in his Foreword to this volume. The
fact that so many academic colleagues—Irish-based and from overseas, senior
and junior, including many of Michael Marsh’s former students—so enthusi-
astically agreed to contribute to this volume is testimony to the high regard
Michael is held in the study of elections. Michael may be the lead editor of this
book—and a very active one at that—but the intention behind its contributors
is also to honour him and to mark his contributions to the discipline.
x
Contents
10. In the Line of Duty: The Moral Basis of Turnout in the 2011
Irish Election 172
André Blais, Carol Galais, and Theresa Reidy
Index 253
xii
List of Figures
2.1. Differences from the working class in support for the four main
parties in the 2002 and 2007 elections 17
2.2. Differences from the working class in support for the four main
parties in the 2011 election 18
2.3. The perceived responsibility of the Fianna Fáil-led government
for the poor economic conditions of 2009–2011 19
2.4. Perceived party positions on a left–right scale between 2002 and 2011 21
2.5. The destination of Fianna Fáil defectors in the 2011 election 22
2.6. Proportions of people supporting each party by left–right
self-placement 23
5.1. Irish Candidate Surveys, comparison of population and sample
distribution by party and year 65
5.2. Placement of parties on left–right dimension, INES 2011 66
5.3. Placement of parties on left–right dimension, CCS 2011 67
5.4. Candidate placement of political parties, 2007–2014 68
5.5. Party candidates’ and party voters’ placement of their own party 69
5.6. Voter self-placement, left–right and taxes spending 70
5.7. Candidate self-placement, left–right and taxes spending 72
5.8. Marginal effects with 95 per cent confidence intervals, voters 2011 74
5.9. Marginal effects with 95 per cent confidence intervals, candidates 2011 75
5.10. Distributions of candidates and voters, left–right scale, 2011 76
5.11. Distributions of candidates and voters, taxes versus spending, 2011 77
5.12. Distributions of candidates and voters, European integration, 2011 78
5.13. Distributions of candidates and voters, immigration, 2011 78
5.14. Distributions of candidates versus party mean position, taxes versus
spending, 2011 79
6.1. Irish voters’ self-placement 2007–2011: Kernel density plot 89
8.1. Respondents’ 2007 evaluations of the fulfilment of four 2002 pledges 129
List of Figures
xiv
List of Tables
xvi
Abbreviations
xx
1
Introduction
Introduction
An ‘Electoral Earthquake’?
In comparative terms, the 2011 general election in the Republic of Ireland was
one of the most dramatic ever witnessed in Europe’s established democracies:
only two other elections (the Italian election of 1994 and the Dutch election
of 2002) have surpassed it in terms of inter-party volatility in established
democracies (Mair 2011).
Whatever way one looks at it, the Irish general election of 2011 appeared
exceptional. The various accounts of it competed to find the most appropriate
metaphor: ‘watershed moment’, ‘perfect storm’, ‘electoral earthquake’ (as an
Michael Marsh, David M. Farrell, and Gail McElroy
example, see Gallagher and Marsh 2011). The most notable outcome of the
election was the collapse of Fianna Fáil, one of the world’s most enduring and
successful parties. In comparative terms, Fianna Fáil’s defeat was among the
largest experienced by a major party in the history of parliamentary democracy.
It went from being the largest party in the state (a position it had held since
1932) to being a bit player in Irish political life; it had never received so few seats
(12 per cent in the lower house) or such a small vote share (17.4 per cent).
The election’s significance was of more than academic interest. The
extremely precarious state of the Irish economy and the real danger of con-
tamination that it presented to the wider Eurozone meant that all eyes were
trained on this election like none before it.
And yet, for all this talk of change, ultimately there was much that remained
the same, perhaps most distinctly of all the fact that no new parties emerged.
It was, if anything, a ‘conservative revolution’. In 2011 Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael,
and Labour—the three parties that have defined Ireland’s ‘two-and-a-half ’
party system—won 133 of the Dáil’s 166 seats, the same total they had jointly
won in 2002 (albeit with very differing individual fortunes).
In order to arrive at a proper sense of the impact of the economic collapse on
the party system and political life in a ‘bailout country’, this study examines,
in depth, underlying voter attitudes in the period 2002–11. Drawing on a rich
dataset of three national election studies, this book follows party system
evolution and voter behaviour from boom to bust. These data permit an
unprecedented insight into a party system and its voters at a time of great
change, as the country went through a period of rapid growth to become one
of Europe’s wealthiest states in the early twenty-first century to economic
meltdown in the midst of the international Great Recession, all of this in
the space of a single decade.
In the process, this study additionally explores many of the well-established
norms and conventional wisdoms of Irish electoral behaviour that make
it such an interesting case study for comparison with other industrialized
democracies. It is these features that have been seen historically to mark out
Irish electoral politics as sui generis (Whyte 1974; Carty 1983). Do any of these
distinctive features still apply? Questions that will be addressed include the
following: Is Irish voting behaviour still a ‘politics without social basis’ (a
position that for so long set Ireland apart from its European counterparts, at
least until electoral dealignment set in more widely) or has a social class
dimension finally emerged? Do political parties still lack programmatic
distinguishability combined with a weak policy focus and does this account
for the relative unimportance of class in voting behaviour? Is the inherent
weakness of the left still reflected in party competition and perceptions of the
policy space? Does the strong candidate-centred emphasis in Irish voting
behaviour still prevail, even in times of crisis?
2
Introduction
In the twentieth century research on Irish elections was based either on the
evidence provided by the election results themselves, including the pattern of
vote transfers available under the single transferable vote (STV) system, or on
commercial opinion polls, supplemented by work using the Irish elements
in broader international studies, most notably the Eurobarometer series.
While some useful work was done using these data, commercial polls were
motivated by a very different set of objectives than is an election study, and
international survey programmes rarely polled at a time close to a general
election. A significant increase in the funding available for university research
at the start of the twenty-first century at least provided an opportunity to seek
money for an election study, and a successful application under the Programme
for Research in Third Level Institutions made possible a post-election survey of
the 2002 general election. The study followed the standard pattern established
elsewhere of a face-to-face probability survey with a sample size of 2,663, fielded
immediately after the election. The response rate for the main questionnaire
was 60 per cent, with over 85 per cent of those completing the supplementary
drop-off questionnaire containing, among other things, a module of questions
from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems project (CSES).1
Following the 2002 study, respondents were sent mail questionnaires on
several more occasions: in November–December 2003, in the summer of 2004
after the June 2004 local and European Parliament elections, and in the first
months of 2006. Response rates—measured against the 2002 baseline—were
45 per cent, 41 per cent, and 40 per cent respectively.2
In 2007, after the general election, a final wave of the study was carried out
face to face as in 2002. This was made possible by a research grant from the
Irish Research Council for the Social Sciences and Humanities. This last wave
was topped up by a short mail questionnaire sent out late in 2007 to panel
respondents who had not been interviewed successfully in 2007, and
there were also interviews with a further 220 respondents to provide a more
representative sample for 2007. The response rate for the panel element was
38 per cent against a 2002 baseline, with a further 4 per cent via the mail
questionnaire. However, this was actually 54 per cent of sought interviews
completed, once deaths and changes of address without notification are taken
into account. In all, 518 respondents completed all five waves of the survey.
No central funding was available for 2011. A more limited budget raised
from a variety of sources, including Trinity College Dublin, University College
Dublin, and a number of the other Irish universities, the Political Studies
1
<http://cses.org> (accessed 20 September 2016).
2
For early analysis using the 2002 INES, see Marsh et al. (2008).
3
Michael Marsh, David M. Farrell, and Gail McElroy
This volume brings together many of the world’s leading scholars in electoral
behaviour and comparative politics to explore the changing landscape of Irish
politics. Drawing on original data from the INES surveys of 2002, 2007, and
2011, the book addresses the themes of change and continuity in a decade
in which the Republic of Ireland went from economic boom to bust. The
chapters that follow examine what has happened to the old shibboleths that
were seen to mark out Irish politics as unique. How permanent a shift have we
seen of electoral alignments? To what extent is this a phenomenon of the
supposed 2011 electoral earthquake, or have the trends being occurring over a
longer period?
Ireland has traditionally been portrayed as a political system in which social
cleavages, and especially the class cleavage based on economic divisions, have
played little role in driving vote choices. Parties have been seen as non-
ideological and not rooted in social groups. In 2011, the implosion of Fianna
Fáil, which up to that point had been not only the dominant political party,
4
Introduction
but also the party that most clearly exemplified the catch-all nature of Irish
parties, changed this picture. In Chapter 2 Tilley and Garry show that not only
were economic divisions based on occupation and income increasingly
important in deciding vote choices at the 2011 election, but that this change
was largely due to the differential defection of previous Fianna Fáil voters to
the other parties. Put simply, voters defected from Fianna Fáil because of
(negative) economic changes, but the party they defected to was predicated
on their place in the economic structure. This realignment of the party struc-
ture was confirmed by the ideological views of people who defected—
defectors to Labour and Sinn Féin were considerably more left wing than
defectors to Fine Gael.
Building on this, in Chapter 3 Leyden and Lewis-Beck examine whether
there is an Irish economic voter, directly comparable with his or her counter-
parts in other Western democracies. In 2011, in the most turbulent of elec-
tions in the midst of the most turbulent of economic times, there never was a
more appropriate time to look at the issue of economic voting in an Irish
election. Starting with a review of the evidence of economic voting in previous
Irish elections (referencing in particular the 2002 and 2007 INES data), this
chapter assesses the strength of the economic vote in 2011 when the country
was in the depths of economic crisis, thus making this a difficult test using
cross-sectional survey data in a context in which everyone perceives a bad
economy. Despite this, Leyden and Lewis-Beck’s analysis reveals that the
impact of economic voting was at its greatest in 2011, adding further evidence
to recent comparative findings that in hard times democratic governments
are punished harder than in normal times for bad economic performance.
The principal finding overall is that the Irish economic voter does exist and
that this can be understood pretty much as economic voters can be under-
stood in other Western democracies.
The Bernhagen and Brandenburg analysis in Chapter 4 further explores this
question of economic voting through a linkage of media coverage of the
economy and voter choice. A considerable body of research exists on the
economic and informational determinants of voting behaviour. However,
unresolved questions remain about the relationship between these two
factors. While economic voting is generally understood as a matter of pro-
spective evaluation carried out on the basis of retrospective cues available to
voters, the extent to which prospective information matters for vote choice
remains unclear, in particular if it conflicts with retrospective experience.
Bernhagen and Brandenburg address this by analysing the two general elec-
tions of 2002 and 2007 before the fiscal and economic collapse and the 2011
election that directly followed the meltdown. These elections provide case
studies of economic voting that enable an investigation of whether during
good times voters reward the government for facilitating the economic boom
5
Michael Marsh, David M. Farrell, and Gail McElroy
irrespective of the extent to which they are exposed to warnings about poten-
tially weak foundations and predictions of economic decline. They link media
content data in the context of the elections with survey data from the
INES. Across the elections they find significant variation in the amount (and
tone) of economic coverage across the media. The chapter also compares
the relative impact of prospective economic information with other valence
cues, such as evaluations of party leaders and non-economic policies and
performance.
Following from this examination of economic voting and class voting, in
Chapter 5 McElroy explores the nature and dimensionality of policy space,
asking whether Irish party competition has changed over the period 2002–11
and what left and right mean in the Irish context. What does the left–right
dimension of political competition mean in Ireland, and how does it affect
political outcomes? Traditionally, the association between political left–right
and voter choice has been weaker in Ireland than in other European societies.
This chapter explores the nature and dimensionality of policy space in Ireland
from the perspective of voters and politicians. What are the principal axes of
competition and is there an identifiable left–right ‘super’ dimension? And, if
so, what issues are bundled under this umbrella? Drawing on original and
directly comparable data from the Irish National Election Study and the Irish
Candidate Survey, the chapter explores the nature of party competition in the
Republic of Ireland from the perspective of voters and election candidates.
Questions that are addressed include whether or not the policy space is viewed
differently by masses and elites, whether or not Irish voters organize their
attitudes to party competition in systematic and meaningful ways, and
whether or not there have been changes in the meaning and consequences
of policy dimensions over time.
In Chapter 6 Bowler and Farrell further investigate this theme of party
system change with a focus on the institutional and behavioural barriers
that prevent radical realignments and dealignments of the Irish electorate.
Despite its proportional representation (PR) electoral system, Ireland has not
seen the multiplication of political parties common to other PR systems.
While some new parties have emerged, they have not been long lasting. The
other feature peculiar to Irish politics has been the large number of independ-
ents elected to parliament—more than in all the other parliaments of Europe
combined. Given the scale of electoral change in 2011, there was reason to
expect that, on this occasion, we might see something different. It is hard to
think of an election more suited to the rise of a new political party in Ireland,
and yet none emerged. Irish voters, angered by the depth of the economic
crisis, were certainly ‘available’ for change, but with nowhere else to go many
appear to have simply given their vote to independents, resulting in their
number rising to one of its highest ever. To some extent the explanation for
6
Introduction
7
Michael Marsh, David M. Farrell, and Gail McElroy
constituency service. One of the most frequently noted features of the Irish
political system is the strong constituency role of local Teachtaí Dála (TDs—
members of parliament). Normatively, this constituency focus is criticized by
some for leading to parliament paying inadequate attention to national pol-
itical issues, but defended by others for the role it plays in linking citizens to
the political system. Public attitudes attach great importance to candidates’
ability to perform this role. Yet, at the 2011 election voters ejected many long-
serving TDs from office. INES data enable us to explore the question of
whether this reflected simple punishment of an unpopular government or
whether there was a change of priorities relating to the importance attached to
constituency service in contrast with the evidence from the previous
two elections. The chapter examines in addition whether attitudes towards
constituency service by TDs was affected by socio-demographic or partisan
factors.
In Chapter 10 Blais, Galais, and Reidy explore what motivates Irish people
to vote, exploring, for the first time at least in an Irish context, the moral
dimension of turnout. Among all the explanations offered for the act of
voting, an attitude stands out for its predictive power on turnout: the belief
that voting is a moral obligation or a civic duty (e.g. Campbell et al. 1960; Blais
and Achen 2010). How strong or weak is this sense of duty in Ireland? How is it
related to the decision to vote or not to vote? And where does duty come from?
This chapter ascertains how many Irish citizens feel that they have a moral
duty to vote, particularly in a time of national crises, as compared with
elections in more prosperous times. It examines in particular whether sense
of duty matters more for those less interested in politics. Finally, the chapter
explores the socio-demographic correlates of duty to vote, with a special
emphasis on age, gender, education, and religion, paying attention to how
they interact with each other.
In Chapter 11 Marsh makes use of more recent opinion poll data to assess
what has happened in the period since the 2011 election. The local and
European Parliament elections that took place in 2014 provided the first real
test of post-2011 electoral alignments. The government parties lost heavily,
but most change was not to the benefit of a somewhat revived Fianna Fáil, as
the three old parties this time mustered only one of every two votes cast.
Extensive polling data from the campaign and polls leading up to late 2015
all enable him to draw comparisons with 2011, asking how far behaviour in
these elections underlines or contrasts with the developments uncovered in
previous chapters. In addition, the chapter seeks to answer the puzzle of how
the gradual economic upturn in the final years of the Fine Gael–Labour
coalition was not matched by an uptake in voter support for either party:
ultimately it was this absence of a ‘feel-good factor’ that was to cost both
parties heavily in 2016.
8
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kai olisi saanutkaan Kreetaa muassani tänne.
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