Rally around the EU flag: Irish party positions on the EU in the wake of Brexit

ABSTRACT

When national interests are threatened by an international political crisis, there is often a ‘rally around the flag’ effect among both the public and the political elite, interpreted as a patriotic response to an external threat. Brexit represented a significant threat both to the Irish economy and to the constitutional settlement on the island of Ireland. In contrast to other international crises that have been studied in relation to the rally effect, a supranational body (the EU) was acting on behalf of the threatened state (Ireland) in the negotiations. This paper examines how Brexit affected Irish party positions on EU affairs in the Republic of Ireland and asks if there was a ‘rally around the EU flag’ at the elite level. Using automated content analysis of parliamentary debates in Ireland between 2014–2019, the results show that there was indeed a significant and sustained pro-EU rally among most Irish parties. The findings also show that the rally effect differs depending on whether the party has a nationalist or internationalist orientation.

KEYWORDS:

• Brexit
• Ireland
• Euroscepticism
• rally around the flag

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank Frank Häge for his valuable advice and input on this research

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The percentage of EU citizens who held a positive view of the EU stood at 34% in May 2016, and had risen to 40% by May 2017 and to 45% by May 2019 (Eurobarometer 85, 87 and 91).

2. Standard Eurobarometer 84, 86 and 91. The corresponding figures for the EU as a whole are 49% (November 2015), 51% (November 2016) and 60% (June 2019).

3. For a more in-depth analysis of Irish public opinion on the EU in the wake of Brexit, see Simpson (2019).

4. Standard Eurobarometer 84, 86 and 89.

5. The Taoiseach’s contributions to these debates involve detailed descriptions of the agenda of each European Council summit (in the case of pre-summit debates) or descriptions of the main decisions made (in the case of the post-summit debates). They are therefore of limited use when measuring party positions on EU issues. This is consistent with the recommendations in the literature on measuring political positions from parliamentary debates, which stresses the importance of isolating procedural contributions from substantive debates (e.g. Lauderdale and Herzog 2016, p376; Grimmer and Stewart 2013, 294).

6. Solidary-People Before Profit maintain separate organisations, but are registered as a single entity in the official registry of political parties. Since 2019 there has been a further organisational split with the formation of a third group, called RISE, under the Solidarity-People Before Profit umbrella.

7. For instance, the Anti-Austerity Alliance’s 2016 manifesto stated that ‘We oppose capitalist institutions such as the EU, IMF and World Bank’.

8. This was done using the jfreq programme (http://conjugateprior.org/software/).

9. Specifically, words that are used in fewer than four separate party contributions are dropped.

10. The Green Party shows a less consistent movement in this direction, as there is a high degree of variation in its position. However, this variation may be due to the fact that the estimates for the Green Party rely on a smaller number of speeches than the other parties.