Today I had to give the first lecture of my ‘elections and voting’ course since Donald Trump’s shock victory. To be honest, I’m glad it wasn’t yesterday. I found myself genuinely upset by the result, to the point where any sort of objective analysis was probably impossible. Anyway, I had a good night’s sleep and spent the…
By Michael Gallagher In 2011, all the economic indicators had plummeted since the previous election in 2007, and it was no surprise that the government parties lost support heavily: their vote share declined by 29.7 percentage points and their seat total fell by 66 in a 166-member parliament. In 2016, by contrast, all the economic…
David Farrell (UCD), Eoin O’Malley (DCU), Theresa Reidy (UCC) and Jane Suiter (DCU) Smaointe (meaning ‘Ideas’) has been founded by a group of political scientists to promote an agenda of political reform in Ireland. As part of our strategy to promote political reform, we have undertaken an assessment of the political reform proposals included in…
Opposition parties rarely win elections, governments lose them. Yesterday’s RedC poll for the Irish Sun seems to shows Fine Gael on its way to losing one. It is trending downward during the campaign. By now we were supposed to see voters considering government formation and moving back to the government. According to one Fine Gael…
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.…
Political Studies Association of Ireland Annual Conference 2015 Gresham Metropole Hotel Cork, 16 – 18 October 2015 The annual conference of the PSAI will take place in Cork over the weekend 16 – 18 October 2015. Paper proposals are invited from all areas of the discipline. A detailed list of themes is included below and…
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…
Post by Dr. Michael Courtney, TCD The big stories of this year’s local elections are the collapse of the Labour party vote and the ongoing rise of Sinn Féin. To a large degree, the surge in Sinn Féin’s percentage of the vote and number of councillors is attributed to a protest vote. The narrative goes…
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 