This roundtable discussion is open to the public and will discuss the February 2016 election results. Contributors will provide an overview of main factors which influenced voting behaviour, will explore the campaign, evaluate the impact of the gender quota, assess the implications for government formation and deliver an evaluation of the long term consequences of the…
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.…
Two new polls were hailed as good news for Fianna Fáil this weekend. A Red C poll put the party up 2 points to 19 per cent, while B&A put the party up 1 point to 20 per cent. In fact, neither change is statistically significant on its own – with the December poll of…
The largest government party, Fine Gael, and the largest opposition party, Fianna Fáil, have both seen their electoral prospects improve over the last months, according to the Irish Polling Indicator. Fine Gael has recovered from a 22% low early December 2014 and now polls around 27%. Micheál Martin’s party also found the way up, increasing…
The first quarter of 2015 has seen a moderate bounce in the polls for the government coalition parties. Fine Gael was at a 22% low in December, now finds itself at 25%. Labour rose from 6% to 8% in the same time. This pattern emerges from the Irish Polling Indicator, which combines all national election…
Adrian Kavanagh, 16th August 2014 The latest in the series of Behaviour & Attitudes polls has brought good news for the Labour Party after a long period of dismal results in previous such opinion polls. The Sunday Times-Behaviour & Attitudes poll of August 16th 2014, estimates party support levels as follows (and relative to the previous Sunday Times-Behaviour & Attitudes poll): Fine…
Adrian Kavanagh, 12th June 2014 (with subsequent updates) The local and European elections brought a (probably quite welcome!) respite to the spate of opinion polls that had appeared in the run up to the May 23rd electoral contests, but June 12th saw the publication of one of the first post-elections opinion polls – the Paddy Power-Red…
Posted by Tom Louwerse, Trinity College Dublin Note: the last Red C poll does not provide separate estimates for the Green Party and Others, therefore the OTH and GP line end in April. Opinion polls are a source of information for voters, parties and the media alike. Especially polls into the popularity of parties are usually…
Irish Politics Forum 