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Party Support and the Referendum results
The Nice Treaty has just been rejected by the voters. The abolition of the death penalty passed as did the ratification of the International Court. The applet below allows you to compare the vote in any of the referendums with the vote of any party or combination of parties at the 1997 election. The rejection of the treaty was quite unexpected. The idea behind the applet was that it might show a correlation between support for particular parties and support (or lack thereof) for the Nice treaty. In fact, it is difficult to find any clear correlation. There is a clear correlation between support for Nice and support for the International Court (but not for abolishing the death penalty). Looking at the parties, the clearest trend seems to be that support for Nice tends to increase with the size of the Fine Gael vote in 1997. This is also true for the combined Fine Gael/Labour vote, particularly in Dublin. This is hardly surprising, as Fine Gael has always been the most pro-European party. There seems to be no clear trend in opposition to Nice (except that there seems to be a correlation between the Natural Law Party vote in 1997 and the size of the vote against the treaty). One cannot say that the Sinn Fein or Green vote in 1997 is related to the size of the No vote in 2001 - although there does seem to be a relationship between support for Sinn Fein and support for retaining the death penalty. In any event, you can draw your own conclusions. Simply select the options you want to appear on the vertical and horizontal axes and the graph will be drawn automatically. You can select as many options as you want. A separate point is plotted on the graph for each constituency. Where the selected party or parties did not contest a constituency, a yellow dot is shown. Otherwise, the points on the graph are colour-coded by region. For example, to compare the vote for Nice with the vote for ratification of the International Court, select the Vertical option for "Yes to Nice" and the Horizontal option for "Ratify Int'l Court. |
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