The Northern Irish identity: attitudes towards moderate political parties and outgroup leaders

ABSTRACT

The Northern Irish identity is said to be a common ingroup identity due to its inclusivity and relationship to more positive attitudes towards religious outgroups. However, research looking at this identity’s political significance has produced inconsistent results. The present research uses a new, large-scale dataset to test hypotheses relating to moderation in political attitudes. An original measure of attitudes towards outgroups leaders is also investigated. The results indicate that Northern Irish identifiers are more inclined to prefer moderate political parties and are more satisfied with the leader of parties associated with the outgroup. The differences in attitudes are significant, but small. Less popular binary identity combinations of Irish–Northern Irish and British–Northern Irish show some evidence of attitudes falling midway between those of Northern Irish identifiers and those with the traditional subgroup identity. The extremely small numbers of these respondents suggest that the Northern Irish identity indicates a rejection of Irish and British identities rather than a synthesis of them. These findings support the claim that the Northern Irish identity can be a common ingroup. This paper fills a gap in the literature in that it utilises the common ingroup identity model as a way of predicting voting behaviour.

KEYWORDS:

• Northern Irish identity
• national identity
• common ingroup identities
• consociationalism
• intergroup trust
• voting

Acknowledgements

The author is extremely thankful for the proofreading of an earlier draft and subsequent advice from Prof. John Garry at Queen’s University Belfast.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 NI21 is a minor party with no representation in the Assembly or Westminster. After a difficult internal debate in 2014, they planned to designate as ‘Other’ from 2016 onwards, although in the past they positioned themselves as Unionist (McAleese, 2014). For the purposes of this analysis, it was considered appropriate to code them as ‘Other’ due to the fact that in 2015 their new centrist position was well established. This debate is of particular significance to this study given this party’s explicit affiliation with the Northern Irish identity. Their website indicates that their number one principle is that ‘At the heart of NI21 is the concept of Northern Irish Identity. No other party explicitly recognises this growing sense of identity’ (NI21, 2016).