Voting Behaviour In The Republic Of Ireland

This is a study of the clash between traditional and modern cultural values in present-day Ireland as indicated by voting behavior from 1981 to 1986 when there were three general elections and two referendums on the sensitive issues of abortion and divorce. Analysis of the results indicates that for many people locality and kinship were still important factors in electoral choice, while traditional Catholic teachings continued to provide the basic guidelines of life. The results also revealed the growth of a significant, mainly urban, minority which was more liberal in outlook and regarded Ireland as a secular society. The conclusions offer valuable information on the effects of the interaction of broad, international economic and social forces on a small, mainly rural country.

The Irish Voter provides the first comprehensive, academic survey of the motives, outlook, and behavior of voters in the Republic of Ireland. It explores long-term influences on voter choice, the economy, party leaders, and the candidates themselves. It also examines how vote and why many do not vote at all. Findings are assessed both within an Irish and a more comparative context. Ireland uses an electoral system that gives voters an unusual degree of freedom to pick the candidates they prefer: the single transferable vote. Attachment to parties is very low, differences between them are often obscure, candidate profiles are very high, and turnout is falling rapidly. However, Irish elections buck international trends as campaigns rely very heavily on personal contact between parties and the voters.

This textbook explores voting behaviour in Irish general elections and referendums since independence in 1922. By interpreting the latest survey, opinion poll and statistical data for the non-psephologist, Richard Sinnott explores how and why Irish voters' preferences have changed, and asks whether the 1922 general election has heralded a fundamental realignment in the Irish political system.

The 2011 general election in the Republic of Ireland, which took place against a backdrop of economic collapse, was one of the most dramatic ever witnessed. The most notable outcome 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. And yet 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'. A Conservative Revolution? examines underlying voter attitudes in the period 2002-11. Drawing on three national election studies the book follows party system evolution and voter behaviour from boom to bust. These data permits 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 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.

This is the definitive study of the Irish general election of 2016 – the most dramatic election in a generation, which resulted in the worst electoral outcome for Ireland’s established parties, the most fractionalized party system in the history of the state, and the emergence of new parties and groups. These outcomes follow a pattern seen across a number of Western Europe’s established democracies in which the ‘deep crisis’ of the Great Recession has wreaked havoc on party systems. The objective of this book is to assess this most extraordinary of Irish elections both in its Irish and wider cross-national context. With contributions from leading scholars on Irish elections, and using a unique dataset – the Irish National Election Study 2016 – this volume explores voting patterns at Ireland’s first post crisis election and it considers the implications for the electoral landscape and politics in Ireland.

For thirty years, Northern Ireland was riven by sustained ethnonationalist conflict over the issue of whether the territory should remain part of the United Kingdom or reunify with the Republic of Ireland. The 1998 Belfast or "Good Friday" Agreement brought peace to the region by instituting a consociational government, which acknowledged the political differences between nationalists and unionists in Northern Ireland and established a legislative body characterized by power-sharing between the region's political parties. In Consociation and Voting in Northern Ireland, the first study to address electoral behaviors and opinions in a power-sharing society, John Garry interrogates the democratic efficacy of Northern Ireland's consociational government. John Garry investigates the electoral period between 2007—when all of Northern Ireland's major political parties joined the power-sharing government—and 2011 and analyzes postelection survey data to assess the democratic behavior of Northern Irish voters. The evidence is used to address the following questions: How democratic is a consociational government? If all the main parties are in the government, and there are no opposition parties per se, is it possible for voters to hold the government to account? Do power-sharing structures simply perpetuate underlying divisions in the constituency? And since consociational power sharing relies on agreements between senior politicians, can citizens end up feeling disillusioned and, therefore, disinclined to vote? In the process of answering these questions, Garry presents new information on shifting identity formations in Northern Ireland and extends his analysis to the implications of power-sharing agreements for other nations.

Electoral behaviour is one of the most dynamic areas of study in the field of comparative politics today. A strongly emerging theme in recent years has been the need to set the study of voting behaviour in its wider context, that is to understand how the behaviour of the individual (non)voter is conditioned by the environment in which the election is occurring. The main motivation for this book is to respond to this need. The Act of Voting examines voting – both the question of whether to vote (ie. electoral turnout) and who to vote for – in context from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives. In addition to other topics and themes, chapters explore the national or social identities of individuals and how these contribute to complex social dynamics, discuss the institutions that determine who is able to vote and over what, and analyse the impact of the locale on the voting act. Offering chapters by up-and-coming scholars in the field of electoral behaviour, as well as reflections on how the act of voting should be viewed in the broadest context – normatively, institutionally and socially, this book will be of interest to students and scholars researching political behaviour, public opinion and politics more generally.

Building on the success of previous editions, Politics in the Republic of Ireland continues to provide an authoritative introduction to all aspects of government and politics in this seventh edition. Written by some of the foremost experts on Irish politics, it explains, analyses and interprets the background to Irish government and contemporary political processes. It devotes chapters to every aspect of contemporary Irish government and politics, including the political parties and elections, the constitution, deliberative democracy, referendums, the Taoiseach and the governmental system, women and politics, the position of the Dáil, and Ireland's place within the European Union. Bringing readers up to date with the very latest developments, especially with the upheaval in the Irish party system and the implications of recent liberalising referendums, the seventh edition combines substance with a highly readable style, providing an accessible book that meets the needs of all those who are interested in knowing how politics and government operate in Ireland.