Chronicle of a death foretold? understanding the decline of fine gael

Abstract

Since its highpoint in the early 1980s, when under Garret FitzGerald, Fine Gael received almost 40 per cent of the first preference vote and took the party to within five seats of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael's electoral support has declined significantly and steadily to a stage where in 2002 they received little over 20 per cent of the vote. We examine some hypothesised causes of this decline, including the effect of the arrival of the PDs, and Ireland's new coalition politics since 1989. We adapt Peter Mair's hypothesis that ‘coalitionability’ would strengthen Fianna Fáil, to argue that it has also caused the decline of Fine Gael by making the party less relevant to voters who wish to influence the formation of a government. This had the effect of allowing parties such as the PDs to continue to take support from Fine Gael. We offer empirical evidence to support this claim.

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the editors and referees for their advice and criticism.

Notes

It should be noted that the Manifesto Research Group data, while a useful resource, is also potentially replete with measurement error. This is because individuals code each document and though it is possible that inter‐coder correlations are high, this has not been checked.

Fine Gael's heaviest losses came from small farmers (who number very few) and C1s whose support for the party dropped nine points to 19 per cent.

These are transfers from voters who can no longer transfer to their first preference party.

These were the Fine Gael leader Michael Noonan's words as he accepted responsibility for the result and tendered his resignation (RTÉ News, 18 May 2002).