Fianna Fáil: the art of adaptive survival

ABSTRACT

For over eight decades, Fianna Fáil demonstrated a remarkable capacity for successful adaptation to cope with a turbulent and increasingly uncertain electoral environment. Unlike many dominant parties that rely principally on state resources to bolster their organizational reach, Fianna Fáil has demonstrated a knack for adapting to challenges in more nuanced and variegated ways to reinforce its long-term advantages within the Irish party system. This article highlights two overarching strategic adaptations, in particular. First, it underscores how Fianna Fáil’s capacity for ideological adaptation has contributed to constraining the electoral arena, thereby preventing minor parties from successfully claiming hot-button issues and instead re-directing competition towards the their party’s relative ability to deliver goods and services locally. Second, it places in high relief Fianna Fail’s capacity to employ extra-parliamentary institutional adaptations within the Irish political system, including the national system of wage bargaining, referenda, and tribunals at times when it suits the party electorally. Taking into account these adaptive strategies is essential for understanding Fianna Fáil’s uncanny electoral staying power.

KEYWORDS:

• Fianna Fáil
• elections
• referenda
• ideological
• extra-parliamentary institutions

Acknowledgements

I am also grateful to many colleagues who provided comments at various stages. These include Tim Scully, Eoin O’Malley, Gary Murphy, Ken Carty, David Farrell, Ben Mainwaring, Patrick McGraw, Scott Mainwaring, Sarah Daly, and Jaimie Bleck.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I used the difference between self- and party-placement of TDs as a robustness check when examining intra-party variation in positions.

2. 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.

3. Anonymous interview with Fianna Fáil politician, 2 June 2016, Dublin.

4. https://www.amnesty.ie/latest/news/2016/03/04/amnesty-internationalred-c-poll-reveals-irish-public-want-expanded-access-abortion-political-priority-incoming-government/.

5. Data for 1981 are from the European Values Survey.

Additional information

Funding

I would like to thank the Kellogg Institute, the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, and the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at the University of Notre Dame for their support of this project. These Institutes helped fund the research for the parliamentary surveys. ISLA and the Keough-Naughton Notre Dame Centre in Dublin also supported the book conference in Dublin in May 2016 when all the papers of this Special Issue were initially presented.