The decline of a dominant political monolith: understanding Fianna Fáil’s vote 1987–2016

ABSTRACT

Our study explores the declining vote of Fianna Fáil, Ireland’s dominant party using a unique fusion of data from the 1989–1999 European Election Studies and the 2002–2016 Irish National Election Studies. We show the weakening of Fianna Fáil’s dominant position is due to electoral change: shifting voter identities and the growing importance of economic evaluations in deciding the vote, which became prominent in the 2000s. Today, there are fewer partisans in general and this has impacted the party, especially since the Global Financial Crisis, when the proportion of Fianna Fáil identifiers dropped substantially. Meanwhile, the party relies on the votes of the oldest generation, a declining slice of the electorate. Further, more highly educated voters have become less likely to vote for the party in the 2000s, meaning Fianna Fáil is drawing significantly less support from a growing segment of the electorate. Finally, the Fianna Fáil vote in the 2000s has been shaped by voters’ economic perceptions, whereas these mattered little before this. Although this benefitted it in 2002 and 2007, it cost the party significant support in 2011. Our findings have implications for why dominant parties are declining and for our understanding of the Irish party system.

KEYWORDS:

• Fianna Fáil
• dominant party
• education
• economic voting

Acknowledgements

We thank Sean McGraw, Eoin O’Malley, Kevin Byrne, Conor McGarry, and Deirdre Tinney, all of whom offered useful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. We are especially grateful for the remarks of two anonymous referees and the feedback of participants at a Special Roundtable Meeting in Dublin in May 2016. Special thanks go to Michael Marsh, Gail McElroy, and David Farrell who allowed us access to the 2016 Irish National Election Study. All remaining errors are ours.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Stephen Quinlan http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3197-4663

Notes

1. Between 1927 and 2016, there were 28 general elections, 17 local elections, 8 European elections, and 8 contested Presidential elections. We count governments from the formation of the Irish state in 1922.

2. While definitions vary as to what constitutes a ‘dominant party’ (for e.g. Cox, 1997; Greene, 2007), we follow O’Leary’s (1994) classification, which posits that for parties to be considered ‘dominant’ they must: (1) regularly win elections, (2) form government on a consistent basis, (3) have governed for a long period of time without interruption, and (4) be capable of using government to shape the society over which they preside.

3. Intra-party transfers are the proportion of preference votes that transfer to the running mates of the same party on the elimination of one of the party’s candidates.

4. The Pedersen Index measures the net change within the party system resulting from the vote transfers from party to party.

5. The effective number of parties was devised by Laakso and Taagepera (1979) to measure party fragmentation by counting parties but also take into account their voting strength. Our data are based on our own analysis of Gallagher’s Election Indices (2015).

6. That is not to say that the GFC did not afflict all generations – our point here is that focusing on the Celtic Cubs and the Independence generation, which we posit is where the generational story lies regarding Fianna Fáil’s decline, we assume that Celtic Cubs will have been affected more by the Crisis.

7. As our data are cross-sectional, teasing out the relationship in full is beyond the scope of this analysis. To allay concerns to the extent we can, we control for partisanship in our models.

8. We acknowledge the EES questions posed to respondents tapping their vote behavior comes after a significant gap has elapsed between the election and the point at which they are questioned. While far from ideal, no other comparative data are available.

9. The EES of 1994 contained pre-election study components but these are not included in our study because of our focus on reported vote. Further, the retrospective economy question included in the EES in 1999 asked respondents about satisfaction with the economy without including a middle category. However, we judge the question to be of sufficient functional equivalence to include it. For robustness we devised models excluding the 1999 data and we detect no significant variations from the results reported in Table 1.

10. Three waves of the European Election Study 1989 were administered, two pre-election and one post-election. The first pre-election wave (Oct–Nov 1988) was in essence a post-election study of the 1987 general election, and thus we are able to model behavior in that election on this basis.

11. Most of the missing values are because of non-response to the left–right position question, which asked respondents to place themselves on a scale measuring their ideological inclination. This is not a surprise given the left–right divide in Ireland is not as clear-cut as in some other European states. For robustness, we estimated our models without this variable. We discovered no significant deviations from our analysis reported in Table 1 (see Appendix C).

12. The EES measures education by asking respondents the year in which they completed their full-time education, whereas the INES measures education by asking respondents about their specific qualifications. As we standardize our measure of education into a post-secondary versus other dichotomy, we do not envision difficulties with the variations in measurement.

13. While Fianna Fáil was in government for part of the time between the 1992 and 1997, we classify the party as being in opposition because it left government two and a half years prior to the 1997 election.