Conor Little

The General Election of 2011 in the Republic of Ireland: All Changed Utterly?

On 9 March 2011, the 31st Dáil (the lower house of the Irish parliament) convened for the first time and elected Enda Kenny of Fine Gael as Taoiseach (prime minister) by a margin of 117 votes to 27. Breaking with tradition, a depleted Fianna Fáil party did not propose an alternative candidate and abstained from the vote. Kenny’s election brought to an end Fianna Fáil’s 14 consecutive years in Cabinet on the back of three successful elections in 1997, 2002 and 2007. It reshaped a political system that Fianna Fáil had previously dominated for more than half a century, holding an apparently permanent plurality of votes and parliamentary seats since 1932 and spending more than 61 of the past 79 years in government. The governing parties sustained extremely heavy losses. Fianna Fáil held onto only a quarter of the seats that it won in the 2007 general election and the Green Party, after almost 22 years in parliament, lost all of its six seats. Fine Gael came closer to an overall majority than at any time since the 1920s, winning more than 45 per cent of the 166 Dáil seats. The Labour Party won more seats than ever before and became the second-largest party in the Dáil for the first time since Fianna Fáil entered parliament in 1927. Sinn Féin, after false dawns in 2002 and 2007, made an electoral breakthrough, more than tripling the number of seats that it won in 2007. Minor left-wing parties achieved small, and for them unprecedented successes and non-party candidates (‘Independents’) of various persuasions were more numerous than at any time since the 1920s. However, the story was not simply one of change: the Irish party system, a product of Civil War divisions in the early 1920s, withstood this electoral earthquake remarkably well, and in many respects the new Dáil and Cabinet were similar to their predecessors.

Ministerial Importance and Survival in Government. Tough at the Top

Are holders of important ministerial positions more likely to survive in cabinet than their colleagues who hold less important positions? This study examines the relationship between the importance of a ministerial position and the length of time ministers are able to survive in government. It is based on an original dataset of cabinet ministers in seven West European countries from 1945 to 2011. Employing a little-used measure of ministerial survival based on overall time in government, it is found that holders of important ministerial positions are more durable than their colleagues who hold less important ministerial positions. Age, prior government experience and the size of the party to which the minister belongs are also associated with consistently significant effects. Further, the study explores the determinants of survival for two types of risk – exiting government with one’s party and exiting without it – showing that the effects of ministerial importance and other covariates are markedly different for these two types of exit. The findings have important implications for the understanding of ministerial and governmental stability.

The Irish general election of February 2016: towards a new politics or an early election?

The general election that followed the ‘earthquake’ of 25 February 2011 (Gallagher and Marsh 2011; Hutcheson 2011; Little 2011) was always going to be an important staging post on the journey from the Fianna Fáil party’s predominance towards some new dispensation. That election took place five years and one day later. It delivered the most fragmented Dáil (lower house of parliament) ever and was followed by Ireland’s longest government formation process. Fine Gael’s Enda Kenny succeeded in becoming the first leader of his party since the 1920s to retain the office of Taoiseach (Prime Minister) after a general election. He achieved this by negotiating a minority coalition with several non-party (‘Independent’) TDs (MPs) and a ‘confidence and supply’ agreement with Fianna Fáil. However, the durability of these arrangements is in doubt.

Portrait of a laggard? Environmental politics and the Irish general election of February 2016

The Irish general election of 26 February 2016 took place in the context of a recovering economy. Although the salience of environmental issues remained low, the election had important environmental policy consequences, with the suspension of recently introduced water charges and the removal of protection from dozens of raised bogs. Climate change mitigation remains a problem for Ireland, not least in the transport and agriculture sectors.

Environmental politics in the 2015 Danish general election

After 10 years of right-of-centre, Liberal Party–led governments, the Social Democrats took office in 2011 in coalition with the Social Liberals and the Socialist People’s Party, and with the support of the Red–Green Alliance. With the next election due no later than 14 September 2015, Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt’s New Year’s speech signalled new spending on social services and restrictions on immigration. Poster campaigns and a series of economic stimulus packages followed. Two shootings in Copenhagen in February, carried out by a young Muslim man, focussed further attention on immigration, integration, and security. The election was called on 27 May, followed by an intensive campaign that culminated with polling on 18 June.

Intra-party policy entrepreneurship and party goals: the case of political parties’ climate policy preferences in Ireland

ABSTRACT This study contributes to the growing literature on the domestic politics of climate change by examining the climate policy preferences of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Labour Party over 20 years. Bringing the concept of ‘policy entrepreneurship’ into the study of intra-party politics, it uses secondary data, party documents, publicly available information and a series of in-depth interviews to develop an understanding of intra-party policy entrepreneurship and political parties’ climate policy preferences. It finds that office-seeking incentives have tended to trump the activities of individuals who have engaged in policy entrepreneurship with the aim of strengthening their parties’ climate policy preferences. In instances where office-seeking incentives for climate policy have been strong, they have often contributed to changes in policy preferences, whether or not intra-party policy entrepreneurship has been present. Theoretically, the study argues that the concept of ‘policy entrepreneurship’ can be usefully borrowed from the public policy literature by researchers of party policy preferences and intra-party politics. Empirically, it adds to the small but growing body of research on climate politics in Ireland.

Political parties and climate policy: A new approach to measuring parties’ climate policy preferences

This study presents an innovative approach to hand-coding parties’ policy preferences in the relatively new, cross-sectoral field of climate change mitigation policy. It applies this approach to party manifestos in six countries, comparing the preferences of parties in Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy and the United Kingdom over the past two decades. It probes the data for evidence of validity through content validation and convergent/discriminant validation and engages with the debate on position-taking in environmental policy by developing a positional measure that incorporates ‘pro’ and ‘anti’ climate policy preferences. The analysis provides evidence for the validity of the new measures, shows that they are distinct from comparable measures of environmental policy preferences and argues that they are more comprehensive than existing climate policy measures. The new measures strengthen the basis for answering questions that are central to climate politics and to party politics. The approach developed here has important implications for the study of new, complex or cross-cutting policy issues and issues that include both valence and positional aspects.

The politics of climate change in Ireland: symposium introduction

ABSTRACT The domestic arena has never been so important for the politics of climate change. The 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change established a global framework that emphasises ‘nationally determined’ responses to climate change. This places national policies – and the political and institutional factors that help or hinder those responses – front and centre. In the comparative study of climate politics, Ireland is not just another understudied case. It is in many respects an interesting case, both for its peculiarities and for what it shares with other countries: its sets of opportunities and challenges; its successes and failures; and the circumstances in which policy-makers have operated. This symposium addresses some rapidly developing areas in the study of comparative climate politics. In doing so, it contributes to developing knowledge of the features that make the Irish case interesting; that make it similar to and potentially representative of other classes of cases; and that make it different from other cases and in some respects unique. Overall, the symposium highlights significant constraints on effective policy responses to climate change in Ireland.