Abstract
This chapter relies on evidence from opinion polls before, during and after the campaign to examine the bases of party support and, in particular, to explain why Sinn Féin did so well. It shows not only when support shifted but also how fragile is party support today. It explores the social bases of support, the role of economic dissatisfaction, the importance of issues such as housing and health, and the extent to which the voters who chose parties of the left in unprecedented numbers had actually moved to the left in their broad outlook. Finally, we examine the role of party leaders and local candidates.
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Notes
- 1.
Michael S. Lewis-Beck, Economics and Elections: the major western democracies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988).
- 2.
The MRBI exit poll was based on 5376 interviews, but for most questions, the N is around 1000 as there were different versions of the questionnaire administered to five subsamples. The Ireland Thinks online poll gathered 1546 responses, and the RED C post-election online poll included 3099 respondents. However, there were only 1500 for some questions, as two slightly different versions of the questionnaire were employed.
- 3.
The poll standings here are based on a moving average calculated over all polls since the last election (see Chap. 1, Fig. 1.1), but simply averaging the polls in the last three months of 2019 gives the same result.
- 4.
The distribution of recalled timings in the Ireland Thinks online poll and the MRBI exit poll shown in Table 10.1 differ, even allowing for differences in the categories given to the respondent, with Ireland Thinks finding people made up their mind earlier than was found in the MRBI exit poll. However, in both polls Sinn Féin voters, on average, did decide earlier.
- 5.
Rory Costello, ‘Party identification in the wake of the crisis: a nascent realignment’, pp. 82–98 in Michael Marsh, David M. Farrell and Theresa Reidy (eds), The Post-Crisis Irish Voter: voting behaviour in the Irish 2016 general election (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018).
- 6.
Our analysis of Irish National Election Study Data 2002, 2011 and 2016 (INES3). On these studies see Michael Marsh, Richard Sinnott, Fiachra Kennedy and John Garry, The Irish Voter: the nature of electoral competition in the Republic of Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008); Michael Marsh, David M. Farrell and Gail McElroy (eds), A Conservative Revolution? Electoral change in twenty-first-century Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); and Marsh, Farrell and Reidy, Post-Crisis Irish Voter.
- 7.
A problem with this question is that responses are quite closely related to interest in politics, and most polls include far more people with strong interest than are found in the population. We have adjusted the data on 2016 and 2020 to ensure that interest is on a par with what is found in the high-quality European Social Survey (ESS) polls , taken every two years since 2002.
- 8.
The Ireland Thinks poll is used here because N is larger than the exit poll or final RED C poll of the campaign. However, patterns in all three are similar. It is well known that the true level of change tends to be underestimated as voters are likely to associate their current support with their past support. A further problem in this election is that all polls in 2020 seem to have shown over-reporting of Fine Gael voting in 2016. The analysis here adjusts for that.
- 9.
See Michael Marsh and Gail McElroy, ‘Voting behaviour: continuing de-alignment’, pp. 159–84 in Michael Gallagher and Michael Marsh (eds), How Ireland Voted 2016: the election that nobody won (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 160.
- 10.
The MRBI exit poll contained only 73 cases of individuals reporting non-voting in 2016.
- 11.
Marsh and McElroy, ‘Voting behaviour’, p. 164.
- 12.
Marsh and McElroy, ‘Voting behaviour’, p. 167.
- 13.
Sara Hobolt , ‘The Brexit vote: a divided nation, a divided continent’, Journal of European Public Policy 23:9 (2016), pp. 1259–77; Hanspeter Kriesi, ‘Restructuration of partisan politics and the emergence of a new cleavage based on values’, West European Politics 33:3 (2010), pp. 673–85.
- 14.
B&A Consumer Confidence Tracker, Jan 2020 (https://banda.ie/wp-content/uploads/J.1611-Banda-Consumer-Confidence-Tracker-FINAL.pdf). Much the same pattern is evident in the more broadly based ESRI/KBC Consumer Sentiment Index (https://www.kbc.ie/blog/consumer-sentiment-surveys/irish-consumer-concerns-ease-further-in-december).
- 15.
Marsh and McElroy, ‘Voting behaviour’, pp. 168–71.
- 16.
A good review is Christopher J. Anderson, ‘The end of economic voting? Contingency dilemmas and the limits of democratic accountability’, Annual Review of Political Science 10 (2007), pp. 271–96; see Michael Marsh ‘Why did the “recovery” fail to return the government?’, pp. 99–125 in Marsh, Farrell and Reidy, Post-Crisis Irish Voter.
- 17.
Marsh and McElroy, ‘Voting behaviour’, p. 169.
- 18.
Red C Opinion Poll, Jan 2020. (https://www.redcresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/SBP-January-2020-Poll-Report.pdf).
- 19.
See note 6.
- 20.
Kevin Cunningham and Johan A. Elkink, ‘Ideological dimensions in the 2016 elections’, pp. 32–62 in Marsh, Farrell and Reidy, Post-Crisis Irish Voter, p. 47.
- 21.
A comprehensive analysis from 2002 showed left–right self-placement was much more closely related to religious/moral attitudes than to those on the economy: Marsh et al., Irish Voter, pp. 39–42. Cunningham and Elkink, ‘Ideological dimensions in the 2016 elections’, find stronger links with social and economic attitudes than in the past (pp. 39–46), but Gail McElroy explores the pattern among candidates and voters, and while the position of candidates could be predicted from their views on tax versus spending, the dimension is still only weakly related to socio-economic issues amongst voters: ‘Party competition in Ireland: the emergence of a left–right dimension?’, pp. 61–82 in Marsh, Farrell and McElroy, Conservative Revolution, particularly pp. 69–75.
- 22.
The moral agenda is associated with party support but not to any great extent. The RED C post-election online poll addressed this question. An 11-point scale on abortion with the range between a total ban (0) and unlimited access (10) finds some differences between parties. Forty-two per cent of Sinn Féin voters are at 10, compared with 36 per cent of Fine Gael voters and 24 per cent of Fianna Fáil voters. Mean positions are not so different though: 8.4 for Sinn Féin, 8.3 for Gael and 7.2 for Fianna Fáil voters, who are also spread more widely. The average Aontú voter is at 3.4, while all the left-wing parties are more liberal than Sinn Féin. See Chap. 11 for candidates’ views on this issue.
- 23.
Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Kaltwasser, Populism: a very short introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
- 24.
These questions come from the CSES Wave 5 questionnaire (see Sara Hobolt, Eva Anduiza, Ali Carkoglu, Georg Lutz, and Nicolas Sauger, CSES Module 5—Democracy Divided? People, Politicians and the Politics of Populism. CSES Planning Committee Module 5 Final Report, 2016 (http://www.cses.org/plancom/module5/CSES5_ContentSubcommittee_FinalReport.pdf) and reflect the anti-elitism aspect of populism. For Irish analyses of the same questions in 2016, see David M. Farrell, Michael Gallagher and David Barrett, ‘What do Irish voters want from and think of their politicians?’, pp. 190–208 in Marsh, Farrell and Reidy, Post-Crisis Irish Voter, pp. 202–5; Theresa Reidy and Jane Suiter, ‘Who is the populist Irish voter?’, Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland XLVI (2016–2017), pp. 117–31. For comprehensive analysis of populism measures, see Alexander Wuttke, Christian Schimpf and Harald Schoen, ‘When the whole is greater than the sum of its parts: on the conceptualization and measurement of populist attitudes and other multi-dimensional constructs’, American Political Science Review 114:2 (2020), pp. 326–41.
- 25.
- 26.
See Stephen Quinlan and Eoin O’Malley, ‘Popularity and performance? Leader effects in the 2016 election’, pp. 209–32 in Marsh, Farrell and Reidy, Post-Crisis Irish Voter, at pp. 209–10.
- 27.
The analogy is from Charles A. Goodhart and R. J. Bhansali, ‘Political economy’, Political Studies 18:1 (1970), p. 69; quoted in M. J. Harrison and Michael Marsh, ‘What can he do for us? Leader effects on party fortunes in Ireland’, Electoral Studies 13:4 (1994), pp. 289–317, at p. 292.
- 28.
- 29.
Unlike at some previous elections, there was no significant gender gap in Sinn Féin’s vote this time. It is possible that McDonald, rather than Adams, as leader had some impact on this, but the gap was also small in 2016 according to the RTE exit poll.
- 30.
See Marsh et al., Irish voter, pp. 181–3.
- 31.
Michael Courtney and Liam Weeks, ‘Party or candidate?’, pp. 126–45 in Marsh, Farrell and Reidy, Post-Crisis Irish Voter, at pp. 135–7.
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Cunningham, K., Marsh, M. (2021). Voting Behaviour: The Sinn Féin Election. In: Gallagher, M., Marsh, M., Reidy, T. (eds) How Ireland Voted 2020. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66405-3_10
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