Electoral Management Policies and Priorities On 16 October 2015, there will be a half-day workshop looking at electoral management practices in Ireland and abroad. The programme includes election specialists working on electoral management bodies, voter registration and the regulation of political parties. The workshop is taking place in the Metropole Hotel in Cork and everyone is…
On Friday the Irish will vote on two issues. Both are being sold as reforms, one a social reform, the other a political reform. Both can be said to have come from the the ‘People’ via the Constitutional Convention. If polls are even broadly accurate one will pass comfortably, the other will be easily defeated.…
There are now so many red lines laid down during the UK general election that forming a coalition is going to resemble a scene from Mission Impossible. SNP won’t support the Tories, UKIP won’t support Labour, Sinn Féin won’t support (or oppose) anyone,… Most of this is just electioneering. Even the one party that’s keeping…
Posted on behalf of Dr Anne O’Brien, National University of Ireland Maynooth. This blog presents the arguments from a paper published in Irish Political Studies by the author. Free access to the paper is available for the month of March at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07907184.2014.922960#abstract Media depictions of women in Irish politics are far from unproblematic. The…
The government launched its new diaspora policy last week – Global Irish – in which it applauded itself on its diaspora policy. Lots of warm words waft throughout the 57-page glossy document. But buried in the detail is a confirmation (on p. 21) that the government has chosen to ignore the recommendation of the Irish…
It was much commented that turnout in yesterday’s Scottish referendum was very high (at 85%), and some also reported that there had been a surge in voter registrations, with as many as 97% of eligible voters registered to vote. Of course if 97% of eligible voters registered then turnout wasn’t actually 85%, but 82.5% (85*.97 – still pretty…
We’re all worried about the decline in turnout, aren’t we? Politicians, academics and other worthies march up to Glenties every year to worry about our failing politics, and to self-flagellate about our failure to reform it. And it’s not just us we’re worried about this year. With the results of the 2014 European elections we…
Post by Tom Louwerse (Trinity College, Dublin) Independents and smaller parties have seen their electoral support increased over the last two months. They now top the Irish Polling Indicator, which combines all national election polls in to one estimate of party support. Independents now score between 25.7% and 31%, followed by Sinn Féin at 21.5-25.7% and…
Posted on behalf of Dr Stephen Quinlan Voters head to the polls on Friday for European and local elections, the first nationwide election since the 2011 Presidential contest (excluding referndums). Interpretations of what the result will mean for each of the parties, domestic politics, and what it may tell us about Irish people’s attitudes towards…
Posted by Eoin O’Malley, Dublin City University Parties are increasingly unpopular. The recently released European Social Survey (wave 6) shows parties are distrusted by 85% of Irish people (compared with parliament and the government distrusted by 75% and 77% respectively). Ireland isn’t that unusual; Most countries show a large majority lacking trust in parties. Danes,…
Irish Politics Forum 