Ideological Flexibility and Electoral Success: An Analysis of Irish Party Competition

Abstract

This article argues that Ireland's major party elites enjoy an unusual degree of ideological flexibility, which in turn provides the parties with an uncommon capacity to adjust programmatically when changing electoral opportunities, or challenges, present themselves. Evidence from two originally designed parliamentary surveys, conducted in sharply different contexts in the 2007 and 2011 elections, supports this finding. A closer examination of individual TDs’ policy positions reveals that TDs possess considerable flexibility to adapt their policy appeals. Although parties may appear programmatically similar at the aggregate level, the high degree of internal ideological heterogeneity reinforces that the autonomy individual TDs have to alter their positions within their local electoral context. These findings point to a conclusion that the presence of a high degree of ideological flexibility, especially at the level of individual TDs, not policy positions in themselves, is critical for understanding electoral politics in Ireland. This conclusion stands in contrast to the popular perspective that competition over policy may alter the nature of party competition in Ireland. The findings also provide a deeper appreciation of how Irish parliamentarians are able to assume policy positions among their constituents that often differ from the party line in legislative votes in parliament.

Keywords:

• political parties
• ideology
• parliamentary surveys

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Kellogg Institute at the University of Notre Dame for their support of this project as well as the graduate students who assisted me in conducting the two parliamentary surveys in Ireland. I am also grateful to many colleagues who provided comments at various stages. These include Gary Murphy, Eoin O'Malley, Niamh Hardiman, Ken Carty, Sarah Daly, Scott Mainwaring, Anne Mische, Guillermo Trejo, Bob Dowd and especially Tim Scully. I would also like to thank Michael Clark, Seth Berry and Joe Waddington for their help with the data. Most of all, I would like to thank Benjamin Mainwaring for his tireless help with the data and insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Notes

1. In both surveys, we sent a personalized letter to all 166 TDs inviting them to participate in the face-to-face survey. We followed up the letter with at least five phone calls to parliamentary assistants to arrange for a time to conduct the interview. The sample in both surveys reflects those who were willing to meet in person to complete the survey.

2. See http://www.rte.ie/news/election2011/party_comparison.html. The 10 issues included jobs stimulus, the abolition of the Health Services Executive, welfare cuts, whether to renegotiate the interest paid to the ESF, whether to renegotiate with some bank bondholders, greater emphasis on taxes in the Budget, whether to reverse the minimum wage cut, measures to deal with negative equity, increases in third-level education fees and charges, and the abolition of the Seanad.

3. See McGraw (2015) for a fuller explanation of this longitudinal and multi-dimensional argument.

4. In terms of party breakdown, in 2007, we interviewed 44/78 Fianna Fáil; 31/51 Fine Gael; 16/20 Labour; 3/4 Sinn Féin; 4/6 Greens; and 4 Independents. In 2011, we interviewed 15/20 Fianna Fáil; 46/76 Fine Gael; 27/37 Labour; 12/14 Sinn Féin; 2/2 Socialists; 1/2 People Before Profit; and 12/15 Independents. There were a few exceptions to this overall representativeness: we interviewed three-quarters of all female TDs in both surveys, all TDs over the age of 60 in the 2007 survey, and 88 per cent of urban TDs in 2007.

5. The following is the list of countries that had considerable numbers of winning candidates in the Comparative Candidate Survey data set and the year of the election and variance explained by party in parenthesis: Australia (2007, .58), Germany (2005, .62), Hungary (2010, .56), Portugal (2011, .80), Sweden (2010, .79), and Switzerland (2007, .77). I weighted the data so that the number of candidates in each party was proportional to that party's share of seats in parliament. When we look at all candidates, rather than winning candidates, the picture is pretty similar, except for Australia, where the number falls from 0.58 to 0.31 in the 2007 election. This also allows us to include Austria (2008, .65) and the Netherlands (2006, .78). Other countries in the survey did not have sufficient numbers to allow a meaningful interpretation. My survey data similarly show that around 30 per cent of the variance in ideology is explained by party in 2007. After the 2011 elections, this share rose to 55 per cent as left-wing parties gained stronger representation. However, this election is a historical outlier, and divides between parties are still weaker in Ireland than other countries.

6. I used the difference between self- and party-placement of TDs as a robustness check when examining intra-party variation in positions. Rather than asking TDs to reflect explicitly on how autonomous they are with respect to their programmatic views, we asked them about their perceptions of their party's positions, and then we examined the degree to which individual TDs differed from their party on the various issues. The results were mixed. For example, minor parties had some of the greatest differences between self- and party placement in both elections, but they also had virtually identical positions on their core issues. Major party TDs were less extreme in breaking ranks from their party line, but they did vary their positions. Unlike the minor parties that appear to have stronger unanimity on core issues and differences on other policies, the major parties appear to have moderate variance between self and party on a larger number of issues.

7. The other parties allotted the following percentages to the economy: Fianna Fáil 55, Labour 32, Fine Gael 32, Sinn Féin 30, and the Greens 23.

8. I aggregated the results for Independents and include them here even though they do not seek to present coherent policy positions. Their diversity of views highlights the various platforms these Independents hold within Irish politics. The two Socialist TDs and one People Before Profit TD interviewed in the 2011 election are not included in these charts but their positions will be discussed in the subsequent analysis. We must be cautious about any interpretations based on these latter parties given the limited number of respondents; however, their policy approach does appear to contrast with that of Ireland's major parties because they maintain much stronger internal party ideological cohesion.