The issue content of party politics in Ireland: a new perspective on the Irish party system and its development

ABSTRACT

The Irish party system has been exceptional both for the weakness of its left-right conflict and for its long-run stability. How then can party competition on policy, and particularly competition between the main parties, be characterised? This study examines the Irish party system from an issue competition perspective, examining the party system agenda and asking whether Irish party competition is marked by differences in issue focus. New data from Irish party manifestos (1981–2020) coded within the framework of the Comparative Agendas Project show that rather than competing by focusing on different issues, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael’s issue focus is very similar and has moved in parallel over time. Nor is a distinct focus on new issues evident in Sinn Féin’s offering as they have emerged as a major party. Moreover, it finds that ‘new politics’ issues have remained marginal and it examines how this has occurred using the ‘crucial case’ of environmental policy. While differences in issue focus do not help us to distinguish the main parties, the politics of competence continues to have an important role and positional politics may be coming to the fore.

KEYWORDS:

• Issue competition
• agenda-setting
• party system
• political parties
• Ireland

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to two anonymous reviewers and to journal co-editor Liam Weeks for their comments and suggestions. The paper also benefited from feedback from Michele Crepaz, Niamh Hardiman, Sean McGraw, and participants in the online Annual Conference of the Political Studies Association of Ireland in October 2020. We also acknowledge excellent research assistance provided by Sofie Pundervold Kristensen, Nanna-Gro Pedersen, Sign Carlsen, Viktor Burkal Simonsen, and Bridget Moylan.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Anti-Austerity Alliance/People Before Profit in 2016.

2 The full list is as follows: Economy, Personal rights, Immigration, Healthcare, Agriculture, Labour, Education, Culture, Environment, Energy, Transportation, Crime and Justice, Social Welfare, Housing, Business, Defence, Technology, Foreign Affairs, European Integration/EU, Local and Regional Affairs, Government Operations, and Politics. See Online Appendix for details.

3 Weighting the parties’ agendas according to their vote share would mean that finding that the parties that constitute the government alternatives possess a control over the party system agenda could easily become a circular argument, since these are also parties with a high vote-share.

4 The parties included in Figure 1 and all other figures below are those listed above. The dots represent the average per election.

5 The trend line in Figure 1 is a smoothed average based on a lowess smoothing procedure with 0.8 bandwidth. The trend lines in Figures 3, 4 and 7 are all based on the same procedure.

6 The shortest document in the dataset is the Fianna Fáil document from February 1982, which contains only 10 sentences. The longest one is the Fianna Fáil 2020 manifesto, which has 2,774 sentences.

7 The Irish version of the CAP coding scheme contains a specific subtopic, 1922, related to Northern Ireland. Within the 22 aggregated policy issues used in the paper, the subtopic is grouped within Foreign Affairs. The hierarchical structure of the coding scheme means that we do not expect this subtopic to capture every sentence that deals with Northern Ireland, as some will be coded to specific sectoral subtopics; however, we do expect it to provide a general indication of whether the parties have allocated a high level of attention to the issue.

8 However, it is important to be aware that this a relative change in attention. The expansion of the capacity of the party system agenda implies that the attention to economic issues as measured in manifesto sentences has not necessarily declined.

9 Each cell in the table shows the name of the issue and share of the agenda taken by this issue. For instance, Sinn Féin devoted 8.2% of its total agenda to health in 2007. The other seventeen issues account for the share of the agenda not occupied by the top five issues.

Additional information

Funding

Data collection for this project was supported by Department of Political Science, Aarhus University and by the Irish Research Council’s New Foundations scheme.

Notes on contributors

Christoffer Green-Pedersen

Christoffer Green-Pedersen is Professor of Political Science at Aarhus University. His research focuses on party competition, agenda setting and public policy. His publications include The Reshaping of West European Party Politics (Oxford University Press, 2019).

Conor Little

Conor Little is a Lecturer in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Limerick. His research focuses on political parties, political careers, public policy, and the comparative politics of climate change, and he has initiated the Irish Policy Agendas Project (http://irishpolicyagendas.eu/).