Eoin O’Malley (15 February, 2011) There’s is some degree of agreement in the opinion polls of all types (different companies, candidate based ballot paper questions and party questions, local polls and national polls) that over the course of the campaign Fine Gael has trended upwards and Labour downwards. As we can see from the Red…
By Mel Farrell (Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS) scholar, Department of History, NUI Maynooth Election 2011 carries the potential to realign Irish politics. As such, this electoral contest promises to take its place among the critical elections of Irish history in 1918, 1922 and 1932. Going on the opinion polls,…
By Michael Gallagher In essence there are two ways of trying to convert opinion poll findings regarding voting intentions into seat totals for the political parties. One, employed in the earlier post by Adrian Kavanagh (5 Feb, two posts below this one), is to assume uniform swing across the country; apply this to the party…
Eoin O’Malley Now that Fianna Fáil has chosen Micheál Martin as leader a week before an election campaign, can he make much of an impact at this stage? Most research suggests leaders have a marginal effect.
Eoin O’Malley (25 January 2011) Last night Fianna Fáil selected two candidates to run in the four seat Dublin Central constituency. Given that the party polled less than 13 percent of the vote in the 2009 by election, and there are no reasons to believe its vote will have increased since then, this is a…
Adrian Kavanagh, 23rd January 2011 Today’s Sunday Independent poll produced some interesting figures and were reflective no doubt of Fianna Fail and Brian Cowen’s recent travails : Fianna Fail 8%, Fine Gael 27%, Labour 29%, Sinn Fein 8%, Green Party 3%, Others 11% (doesn’t include Don’t Knows). As this poll was just based on 200 responses, it is not…
Eoin O’Malley (22 January, 2011) Brian Cowen’s decision to stand down comes mainly because he showed a lack of political judgement in pursuing a cabinet reshuffle to renew his party just weeks before an election. Cowen claimed he should have been allowed to reshuffle his cabinet as he wanted. He said it was the convention that party…
Eoin O’Malley (UPDATED 17 January, 2011) The fact that Cowen has pushed for a vote of confidence in his leadership would seem to indicate that he is secure that he has the numbers to win it. He has the advantage of having spent the previous three days canvassing support openly, whereas Micheál Martin was unable or unwilling to…
Adrian Kavanagh, 7th January 2011 Ah a New Year dawns (Happy New Year btw folks) and brings with it a new poll and some more figures to be crunched. A Red C poll carried out for Paddy Power estimates party support as follows: Fianna Fail 14%, Fine Gael 35%, Labour 21%, Sinn Fein 14%, Green Party…
Adrian Kavanagh, 21 December 2010 – latest updates: 30 December 2010 As an alternative perspective to the opinion poll results that have been published over the past few weeks and my constituency-level models and analysis of these, Newstalk 106-108 FM this morning presented the findings of a prediction survey that was able to draw on…
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