Back in September I speculated about the voters' desire for change and a general feeling that Fianna Fáil had been in office too long. But along came 'Bertiegate' and the picture has changed dramatically. One way of interpreting the last dose of polls is that voters seemingly fear change and the opposition are no longer to be trusted to manage our prosperity. Yesterday's papers, reporting on the Fianna Fáil Ard Fheis, say the party is "on a roll" if not "riding high on a tide of arrogance and hubris". So what do the voters want?
We lack proper in depth survey data that can really get a true picture of political attitudes and beliefs. The odd poll, even the Red C monthly tracking polls, only provide a snapshot of opinion that is highly contingent on what is in the news at the time of the survey. If we had something comparable to the British Election Panel Surveys we would be able to track the views of a much larger sample of the electorate over a longer time frame.
The little we can glean from opinion polls suggest that voter attachment to political parties is weakening and there is ample evidence of greater voter volatility. Only a minority of voters in Ireland consciously choose parties as an extension of their own ideological preferences, though perhaps the Greens are a partial exception to this. Instead voters seem to either vote for a government or for a local candidate. By the latter, I mean that some voters place a premium on having their part of a constituency represented in the Dáil and the fact that under PR-STV we can vote across party lines is something that reinforces this attachment to localism. What I mean by voting for a government is where voters are making a judgement on the competence of the rival claimants for office.
The dominant divisions in Irish politics were based on different positions on the issues of national independence and sovereignty rather than on other divisions such as centre versus periphery or owner versus worker. The party system has become more complex since the early decades of the new state. For many years elections were essentially a competition between Fianna Fáil versus the rest and the result of the election was usually clear enough in terms of who was going to form the government. This is no longer so. Voters can no longer be sure that a vote for party x is also a way of registering a desire to throw party y out of office - think of all those Labour supporters in 1992 who thought they were voting to kick out Albert Reynolds.
The clearcut distinction between "government" and "opposition" and the choice between the two is perhaps more typical of plurality rather than PR systems. Defenders of the former often argued that clarity of choice was the great virtue of the first past the post electoral system, in other words there was a direct relationship between a person's vote and the choice of government. In Ireland, up to the 1980s, we had much the same logic to voting and government formation, despite the fact that we had proportional representation. This is less the case now as there are new political parties embedded in the party system and Fianna Fáil will usually have to find a coalition partner.
There is a greater opportunity than ever before for the Irish voter to choose a political party on the basis of political ideology or a reasonably coherent set of beliefs. But the signs are that voters are cynical and disillusioned by parties as they are all perceived to put the persuit of office above policy and (future) votes (perhaps Sinn Féin is the partial exception this time). Also there is a basic consensus on most issues that unites most of the parties in our system. I suspect that this is one of reason for the proliferation of successful independent candidates in the last couple of elections. If choices between rival policy platforms are unconvincing, then why not go local?
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