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Party Loyalty (2)
An earlier article speculated that voters have become less likely to vote by party. Instead of voting for all the candidates of their favourite party, and then transferring their votes to their next favoured party, voters seem more likely to vote by candidate. Now that the database contains the complete election results from the last 5 elections (November 1982, 1987, 1989, 1992 and 1997), more accurate calculations can be made. Fianna Fail always nominate more than one candidate in every constituency, and Fine Gael almost always do likewise. For these parties, the percentage of votes transferred from one candidate (whether from a surplus or from an elimination) to their party colleagues can be calculated. This should give a good indication of how loyal a party's supporters are. There a few points to be considered, however:- a) when surpluses are distributed, non-transferable votes are excluded as far as possible, thus inflating the percentages of votes being transferred b) the more successful a party is, the more surpluses it will have to distribute, and this may inflate its transfer percentages. While support for Fianna Fail and Fine Gael has declined since November 1982, it is difficult to imagine that this can account for the decline in loyalty of their supporters c) the calculation assumes that once a voter gives a preference to Fianna Fail or Fine Gael, that, from that preference onwards, they will vote in the same way as those who gave Fianna Fail or Fine Gael their first preference. For example, if a voter gives the only Labour candidate their first preference and then gives their second preference to Fine Gael, the calculation assumes that their subsequent voting behaviour is identical to that of a voter who gave Fine Gael their first preference, and that they will be equally as likely to give their next preference to a second Fine Gael candidate d) counts where votes from two or more parties were distributed simultaneously are not included in the calculation e) the November 1982 election was fought at the height of the Haughey/Fitzgerald rivalry. The two main parties took 84.44% of the votes between them - a figure that declined to 67.28% at the 1997 election. (Perhaps not coincidentally, these percentages are very close to the calculated transfer percentages) The actual transfer percentages for the last 5 general elections are:-
Some brief background information:- - Fine Gael obtained their highest ever share of first preference votes, 39.21%, in the November 1982 election, exceeding even Cumann na nGaedheal's best performance in the 1920's. - the Progressive Democrats contested their first election in 1987, winning 14 seats. - the 1989 election was Charles Haughey's last attempt to win an overall majority. Albert Reynolds had replaced him as leader of Fianna Fail by 1992, and he himself had been replaced by Bertie Ahern by the 1997 election - Labour had their best ever election result in 1992, winning 33 seats. - the 1997 election was the first election where Fianna Fail had a transfer pact with another party (the Progressive Democrats). The party won 9 seats more than in 1992, despite polling virtually the same percentage of first preferences. |
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