Social Background and Intra-party Attitudes in Ireland

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to assess whether variation in the social background characteristics of political elites is associated with variation in intra-party attitudes. The skewed distribution of gender, age and social class among political elites may substantively affect the distribution of political attitudes within a legislature compared to society as a whole. Although it is well established that party affiliation is the strongest predictor of attitudes within a legislature, social background may structure attitudes within political parties. This paper tests the extent of intra-party social background effects using a case study of Ireland, where inter-party attitude variance is low. It finds that gender and social class are the strongest social background predictors of intra-party attitudes, thus justifying a wider social focus on demographic rates of political participation.

Keywords:

• proportional systems
• demographics
• policy views
• elite respondents
• Ireland

Acknowledgement

The author is thankful to the Comparative Candidate Survey project for some of the data included in this work. The author also thanks Michael Gallagher, Michael Marsh and Gail McElroy.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07907184.2015.1021796.

Notes

1 This competition manifests itself mostly in the form of constituency work. TDs see their chances of re-election being associated with outperforming their intra-party rivals at constituency work (Sinnott, 2010), though the environment could also incentivise TDs to distinguish themselves ideologically.

2 The data for this project came from the Comparative Candidate Survey 2011 which is available at http://www.comparativecandidates.org/, the PartiRep survey which is available at http://www.partirep.eu/ and interviews conducted by the author. The coded interview data cannot be made public due to confidentiality agreements with respondents and the possibility that even anonymous background information such as party, gender and age could be used to decode respondent identities.

3 Mail surveys limit the range of questions that can be asked as they lend themselves to more brief and closed questions (Blair, 1999), In addition, face-to-face meetings provide the interviewer with the opportunity to note an individual's body language and demeanour, observe that individual in his or her environment and clarify and follow-up responses where necessary (Manheim & Rich, 1995).

4 PARTIREP MP Survey, funded by the Belgian Federal Science Policy BELSPO: www.partirep.eu.

5 See supplementary appendix for summary table of demographic characteristics.

6 In the CCS data specifically, the average level of variance between the Irish parties (party-level variance) is 17 per cent, which is quite consistent with the PartiRep data. The inter-party variance ranges from 39 per cent on the left–right self-placement item to 8 per cent on attitudes to the relationship between working women and their children. Thus, the majority of variance on all items is within parties rather than between them.

7 See supplementary appendix for tables with item loadings and figures of predicted variable distributions.

8 The most mechanical explanation for this phenomenon is the centripetal effect of the electoral system (Mitchell, 2006). PR-STV incentivises parties to appeal to voters of all other parties in order to maximise transfer preferences which can be decisive in the final count.

9 For more background on the 2011 general election and its political consequences, see Gallagher and Marsh (2011) and Courtney and Gallagher (2012).

10 Variable for SENATOR used in models where TDs are the majority group.

11 The macro effect would be systemic differences in a cross-country comparative or time-series analysis.

12 The INES was undertaken following the Irish general election in February 2011. This iteration of the study is not publicly available, but five waves covering 2002–2007 are available at http://www.tcd.ie/ines/.

Additional information

Funding

The empirical work for this paper was funded by the Irish Research Council (formerly the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences) under the Government of Ireland Postgraduate Award and the Department of Political Science at Trinity College Dublin's PhD Scholarship.