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Party loyalty
How strong is party loyalty in elections in Ireland? Under the multi-seat stv system used both North and South of the border, this can be estimated by calculating the percentage of votes from eliminated or elected candidates that were transferred to party colleagues still in contention. Given that Northern Ireland politics is much more partisan than in the Republic, one would expect that the parties in the North would have significantly greater party loyalty. The figures for parties in the North from the 1998 Assembly election are (in descending sequence)
The corresponding figures from the 1997 Dáil and 1992 Dáil elections are:
Unsurprisingly, all parties in the South showed lower levels of voter loyalty in 1997 than in 1992. Perhaps this was a reflection of the closeness of the parties' policies, given that they were was broad agreement between then about ensuring the Republic's place in EMU. In the North, it is interesting that the figures for the 3 "moderate" parties - Alliance, SDLP and UUP are so close together. One would naturally expect that the supporters of the more "extreme" parties would have more strongly held views and would therefore be more likely to continue their preferences within their preferred party. The relatively low figures for some parties (UKU in the North, Sinn Féin and Labour in the South) may reflect the fact that these parties normally nominate only 1 candidate per constituency. The percentage calculated may therefore be based on a small no. of occurrences. Also, the stv election system tries to avoid wasting votes when transferring surpluses. This may make it appear that the more successful parties (with a high proportion of surpluses to distribute) have a more loyal following than their less successful counterparts. The figures were taken from the transfer matrix generated by the System/Matrix function from the Election Database main menu. |
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