Guest post by Dan Haverty, intern with the Atlantic Council’s Millennium Leadership Programme and graduate of UCC’s MA in International Relations. Party systems often seem rigid and immutable—until they are not.
Guest post by Joe MacDonagh, lecturer at the School of Business and Humanities, IT Tallaght. This post is based on his paper to PSAI Annual Conference 2017, titled ‘PM Theresa May––appealing to the few and not the many?’, due to be presented Saturday 14 October.
Guest post by Dr Rory Costello, Lecturer in Politics and Public Administration at the University of Limerick. Ireland now has a decidedly fragmented party system, which brings a number of challenges but also potential benefits. Party fragmentation can make effective government difficult, as we have seen in Ireland over the past year. On the plus…
Guest post by Chris Raymond, Lecturer in Politics at the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics, Queens’ University Belfast; and Jacob Holt, Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science, Columbus State University.
By R. Kenneth Carty (University of British Columbia) Making sense of Irish electoral politics has always required coming to grips with Fianna Fáil: just what kind of a party is it? Long dominant, as the most successful party in Western Europe, it seems to be an exception to our understanding of the patterns of democratic…
The first results of the Political Party Database project were published recently in Party Politics. Irish political parties were included in this international audit of the state of party politics in 19 democracies. In summary, the data show Irish parties in pretty good health: they’re well funded (in large part by the state) and well…
With the new government already having suffered its first defeat, we are clearly not in a period of politics as usual in the Oireachtas. This raises the question of whether Ireland’s ‘Triple Lock’ on overseas deployments will take on greater significance in the new Dáil. The ‘Triple Lock’ which entered the political lexicon during the…
Guest post by Prof R. K. Carty, University of British Columbia Some seem surprised by Fianna Fáil’s success in the February election. They shouldn’t be. Indeed there are so many reasons that help explain it that untangling their relative contribution will take some time.
Monday night’s leaders’ debate should put in the ground the idea that the left-right dimension is the key one in politics. On Monday we saw parties such as Renua (the right) and Social Democrats (centre-left) taking aim at what they saw as the enemy, not each other, but the ‘Establishment’. Similarly Gerry Adams tried to distance…
By Michael Gallagher Election campaigns feature extensive, some would say excessive, discussion of the horse-race aspects: in short, how many seats will the parties win? Until the votes are cast and counted, all we have to go on are the findings from opinion polls, and the challenge is to make accurate seat predictions from these.…
Irish Politics Forum 