When Mini-Publics and Maxi-Publics Coincide: Ireland’s National Debate on Abortion

ABSTRACT

Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly (CA) of 2016–18 was tasked with making recommendations on abortion. This paper shows that from the outset its members were in large part in favour of the liberalisation of abortion (though a fair proportion were undecided), that over the course of its deliberations the CA as a whole moved in a more liberal direction on the issue, but that its position was largely reflected in the subsequent referendum vote by the population as a whole.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizens’ Assembly
• deliberative mini-public
• abortion

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The Irish Constitution can only be changed by a referendum. In recent years the numbers of referendums have increased significantly, in part a product of social modernization (Elkink et al., 2020; Gallagher, forthcoming), in part too reflecting the practice of Irish politicians to use referendums as a device to avoid taking difficult decisions themselves (McGraw, 2015).

2 For more discussion of the Citizens’ Assembly, its descriptive similarity to the wider population and the quality of its deliberations see Farrell et al. (forthcoming).

3 Prominent examples of this include the 2017 citizens’ assembly on Brexit (https://citizensassembly.co.uk/brexit/about/) and the 2020 Climate Assembly UK (https://www.climateassembly.uk/detail/recruitment/).

4 https://static.rasset.ie/documents/news/rte-exit-poll-report.pdf

5 E.g. https://qz.com/822398/hillary-clinton-might-not-win/

6 We don’t have the data to assess which of these perspectives might apply.

7 While there could be grounds for arguing that someone opposed to constitutional change on abortion may not necessarily hold to a conservative, pro-life position, when we compare responses to this question with responses to a separate battery of abortion-related questions (which had binary agree/disagree options) it is clear that this is a good measure of a conservative position.

8 The survey was implemented by Ireland Thinks, a market research company. A random sample of 1,029 adults (aged 18+) were surveyed by telephone between 27 February and 3 March 2017.

9 It is notable that this opinion poll was not dissimilar to subsequent public opinion polls. Thirteen public opinion polls were conducted by five different polling companies over the period up to the referendum itself. The average across the polls included 65 per cent in favour of change and 35 per cent opposed. The result itself was also 65 per cent in favour, 35 per cent opposed (Field, 2018).

10 The multi-level model is grouped at the level of the individual members: the reason for this is because our sample consists of repeated observations of the same individuals.

11 Over the course of the five weekends, an additional 24 members were recruited (Farrell et al., 2019).

12 As a further test we replicated this analysis using our constitutional change question as a proxy for abortion, thus allowing us to track trends from the start of week one. This produced similar findings.

13 We are grateful to one of our referees for this suggestion.

14 A separate model including all demographics as controls (including age and gender) found no significant relationships.

15 It is worth pointing out that the challenges also relate to the research that was commissioned to track and evaluate the process. For the organizers of government-sponsored Citizens’ Assemblies of this type the primary duty is to ensure that the process works successfully (which was the case here). But this can lead to a tension with those charged with carrying out research and evaluation of the process, which in this instance impacted on the types of questions (and in some instances even the wording of the questions) that could be asked of the members.

16 https://2016-2018.citizensassembly.ie/en/The-Eighth-Amendment-of-the-Constitution/The-Eighth-Amendment-of-the-Constitution.html

17 Ronan McGreevy, ‘Oireachtas given a mandate to change the eighth amendment’, Irish Times. 24 April 2017.

18 Leah McDonald, ‘Citizens’ Assembly: 64% want abortion without restriction’, Irish Daily Mail. 24 April 2017.

19 For example, and as noted above, the 2019–20 UK Climate Assembly included attitudes to climate change as a selection criterion (more generally, see Paulis et al., 2020).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Irish Research Council: [Grant Number n/a].

Notes on contributors

David M. Farrell

Professor David M. Farrell, MRIA, holds the Chair of Politics at University College Dublin, email address: [email protected].

Jane Suiter

Dr. Jane Suiter is Associate Professor in the School of Communications at Dublin City University.

Kevin Cunningham

Dr. Kevin Cunningham is a Lecturer in Politics at the Technological University Dublin.

Clodagh Harris

Dr. Clodagh Harris is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Government and Politics at University College Cork.