Voting Behaviour: Continuing De-alignment
This chapter uses survey data, and particularly that from the Radio Telefís Éireann Exit poll to explore why people voted as they did. Behaviour shows a very high level of individual volatility, reflecting the very low levels of party attachment in Irelan
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Voting Behaviour: Continuing De-alignment Michael Marsh and Gail McElroy
As we saw in the previous chapter, this election was notable once again for the size of the swing against the governing parties. As in 2011, the incumbents lost very heavily at the polls, and unlike the 1970s and 1980s, when all governments ‘lost’ elections without suffering huge losses, the scale of the defeat was again massive. The collapse of Fianna Fáil in 2011 was hardly a surprise given the scale of economic collapse, but the Fine Gael–Labour defeat this time is more unexpected given the extent of the economic recovery. The electorate is, clearly, in an unforgiving mood, and it now seems easier to win support at one election than to keep it at the next one. While 2011 might have been the first step towards a realignment of Irish politics, 2016 suggested that it was rather a sign of de-alignment with voters abandoning their old partisan affiliations and failing to find new ones. The scale of volatility indicates that there is now little binding voters to particular parties. However, there was also no shortage of new parties and new candidates looking to establish themselves and with the growth of Sinn Féin, AAA–PBP, the Social Democrats and some left-wing independents there was arguably a shift on the left to more radical alternatives. Some have viewed this as evidence for a clearer left–right, class-structured politics: a realignment of sorts.
M. Marsh () • G. McElroy Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland © The Author(s) 2016 M. Gallagher, M. Marsh (eds.), How Ireland Voted 2016, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40889-7_7
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M. MARSH AND G. MCELROY
We start this exploration of voting behaviour by looking at the change in individual party choices from 2011 to 2016. We do this by using data from the RTÉ Exit poll in which respondents were asked not only how they had voted in 2016 but also to recall how they voted in 2011.1 It is generally accepted that such recall of past vote is often inaccurate and can be biased by current voting intentions. Certainly, such data underestimate the amount of change that has taken place as voters confuse their current vote with that from five years ago, but nonetheless it does give a reasonable guide to the pattern of change. In this data, it would seem that more people recall voting Fianna Fáil in 2011 than actually did so, and many fewer recall voting Labour than must have done so, but this is to be expected as for many, a vote for Labour in 2011 would have been an unusual choice, while many who would normally have voted Fianna Fáil could not bring themselves to support that party at that time.2 Table 7.1 shows the scale of the turnover in vote between 2011 and 2016 with the data weighted to conform to the actual election result. As we might have expected, Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin hung on to most of their 2011 voters, with more than three quarters of those voting for Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin in 2011 voting for the same party in 2016. But Fine Gael and Labour suffered big losses. Fine Gael votes prim
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