The challenge of reforming a ‘voter-friendly’ electoral system: the debates over Ireland’s single transferable vote

ABSTRACT

In the 2011 Irish general election, held in the midst of the economic crisis, electoral reform was catapulted to the top of the agenda, with all of the political parties including proposals for electoral reform in their manifestos. The matter was subsequently given to the Irish Constitutional Convention to discuss. The Convention recommended keeping a modified version of the existing single transferable vote electoral system. This article reviews the Irish debate, showing how for the most part the impetus for electoral reform came from the party leaderships. By contrast, mass public opinion on the issue was at best equivocal. A curious feature of the Irish debate was how arguably it was strategically misdirected, at least on the part of the mainstream parties: the reforms being promoted by the elite were more likely to have weakened the position of the established elite than to have strengthened it.

KEYWORDS:

• Electoral systems
• electoral reform
• single transferable vote

Acknowledgement

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the conference on ‘Electoral System Reform’, organized by the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective, Stanford University, 14–15 March 2014. We are grateful to the participants and to this Journal’s editor and reviewers for their comments and feedback. The authors were members of the ‘Academic and Legal Support Group’ that supported the work of the Irish Constitutional Convention. We thank Eoin O’Malley for his advice and suggestions, and Akisato Suzuki for his research assistance. The usual disclaimer applies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. http://www.oireachtas.ie/viewdoc.asp?fn=/documents/Committees30thDail/J-Constitution/Report_2008/20100722.pdf.

2. For details, see https://www.constitution.ie/AttachmentDownload.ashx?mid=fdf70670-030f-e311-a203-005056a32ee4.

3. The full list of recommendations were as follows: (1) The STV electoral system should be amended to ensure that the smallest constituency size is a 5-seater and (2) to remove the alphabetical order of candidates on the ballot paper; (3) The state should establish an Electoral Commission; (4) Polling hours/days in should be extended; (5) There should be greater access to postal voting; (6) Accuracy of the electoral register should be improved; (7) Measures should be introduced to increase electoral turnout; (8) Education programmes should be introduced in schools; (9) There should be non-parliamentary ministers in government; (10) Members of the Dáil should be required to resign their seats on being appointed to ministerial office; (11) Citizen-initiatives should be introduced (both for influencing the parliamentary agenda and for the calling of referendums). This pretty sweeping interpretation of the ‘electoral reform’ agenda meant that at one and the same time the ICC ended up supporting relatively minor change to the electoral system narrowly defined and pretty extensive change to electoral systems in the broadest sense.

4. http://www.oireachtas.ie/documents/committees30thdail/j-constitution/report_2008/Article1620100204.pdf.

5. As we have seen, had the Fine Gael leader had his way in 2009 this would also have been the proposal of his party.

6. TD survey by the Joint Committee on the Constitution, 2009. (http://www.oireachtas.ie/documents/committees30thdail/j-constitution/report_2008/Article1620100204.pdf).

7. This line of argument is based on Farrell et al. (2015).