Northern Irish voters and the British-Irish agreement: Foundations of a stable consociational settlement?

Political Quarterly

Volumn 71, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 78-101

  Evans, Geoffrey ^a   O'Leary, Brendan ^b  

^a NUFFIELD COLLEGE   (United Kingdom)

^b LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0033633904     PISSN: 00323179     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-923X.00282     Document Type: Article

References (27)

1. 1 More generally, consociation involves the following institutional arrangements: executive power-sharing; proportionality rules throughout political institutions and the public sector(s); community self-government in cultural, educational and religious (or non-religious) matters; and minority veto-rights. See Arend Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1977.
2. 2 For full details see Brendan O'Leary, 'The Nature of the British-Irish Agreement', New Left Review, 233, 1999, pp. 66-96.
3. 3 Descriptions of the workings of the single transferable vote (a system of preferential voting in multi-member constituencies) can be found in most guides to electoral systems; see e.g. Rein Taagepera and Matthew Soberg Shugart, Seats and Votes: The Effects and Determinants of Electoral Systems, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1989, pp. 26-8, or David Farrell, Comparing Electoral Systems, Hernel Hempstead, Prentice-Hall, 1997, ch. 6. It was a 're-adoption' because in the 1996 election to the Northern Ireland Peace Forum the Conservative government chose an electoral formula that was truly byzantine - a pure region-wide party-list system (with a Droop quota followed by a d'Hondt divisor - mathematically equivalent to pure d'Hondt) topped up with 20 reserved seats, with two to be given to each of the parties that finished in the top ten of the region-wide vote-share. It was widely criticized, though it did facilitate the election of Loyalist parties (the PUP and the UDP) and the Women's Coalition - parties that played a constructive role in the inter-party and inter-governmental negotiations. Since 1973 STV has been use in Northern Ireland for local government and assembly elections, and since 1979 it has been used for elections to the European Parliament. What was novel about the June 1998 elections was that STV was being used after an agreement had been reached by Nationalist and Unionist political elites.
4. 3 Descriptions of the workings of the single transferable vote (a system of preferential voting in multi-member constituencies) can be found in most guides to electoral systems; see e.g. Rein Taagepera and Matthew Soberg Shugart, Seats and Votes: The Effects and Determinants of Electoral Systems, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1989, pp. 26-8, or David Farrell, Comparing Electoral Systems, Hernel Hempstead, Prentice-Hall, 1997, ch. 6. It was a 're-adoption' because in the 1996 election to the Northern Ireland Peace Forum the Conservative government chose an electoral formula that was truly byzantine - a pure region-wide party-list system (with a Droop quota followed by a d'Hondt divisor - mathematically equivalent to pure d'Hondt) topped up with 20 reserved seats, with two to be given to each of the parties that finished in the top ten of the region-wide vote-share. It was widely criticized, though it did facilitate the election of Loyalist parties (the PUP and the UDP) and the Women's Coalition - parties that played a constructive role in the inter-party and inter-governmental negotiations. Since 1973 STV has been use in Northern Ireland for local government and assembly elections, and since 1979 it has been used for elections to the European Parliament. What was novel about the June 1998 elections was that STV was being used after an agreement had been reached by Nationalist and Unionist political elites.
5. 4 This study was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, and conducted through the auspices of the Centre for Research into Elections and Social Trends (CREST). The questionnaire and survey were designed by Geoffrey Evans in collaboration with John Curtice of CREST, and Bernadette Hayes and Lizanne Dowds of the Queen's University, Belfast, together with advice from a range of experts on the region, including Brendan O'Leary.
6. 5 We use the terms Catholic and Protestant to refer to cultural Catholics and cultural Protestants-these labels imply no suggestion that the conflict is primarily religious; indeed we would argue vigorously against this thesis.
7. 6 Such experience not only tells its own story, but can be expected to affect attitudes towards the treatment of prisoners who have been sentenced for 'scheduled offences' and the vexed issue of decommissioning.
8. 7 Despite this, Catholics are more likely to understand the reasons behind Loyalist violence than vice versa: Catholics are almost as likely to say they have 'sympathy with reasons for the violence' with respect to Loyalist paramilitaries (20 per cent) as they are for Republican paramilitaries (27 per cent) - a gap of only 7 per cent -whereas Protestants are more one-sided: 30 per cent have 'sympathy with' the reasons for Loyalist violence, but only 12 per cent report having some sympathy for Nationalist violence - a gap of 18 per cent.
9. 8 The greater exclusionist and anti-integrationist/assimilationist disposition among Protestants occurs despite the generally more negative experiences associated with the troubles reported by Catholics, which correlate at the individual level with opposition to integration.
10. 9 For a discussion of the difference between difference-elimination and difference-management approaches to conflict-regulation see John McGarry and Brendan O'Leary, The Politics of Ethnic Conflict Regulation, London and New York, Routledge, 1993, ch. 1.
11. 10 Geoffrey Evans, 'Northern Ireland during the Cease-fire', in R. Jowell, A. Park, L. Brook and K. Thomson, eds, British Social Attitudes: The 13th Report, Aldershot, Dartmouth, 1996, pp. 117-40; Geoffrey Evans and Brendan O'Leary, 'Frameworked Futures: Intransigence and Flexibility in the Northern Irish Elections of May 30 1996', Irish Political Studies, 1997, pp. 23-47.
12. 10 Geoffrey Evans, 'Northern Ireland during the Cease-fire', in R. Jowell, A. Park, L. Brook and K. Thomson, eds, British Social Attitudes: The 13th Report, Aldershot, Dartmouth, 1996, pp. 117-40; Geoffrey Evans and Brendan O'Leary, 'Frameworked Futures: Intransigence and Flexibility in the Northern Irish Elections of May 30 1996', Irish Political Studies, 1997, pp. 23-47.
13. 11 Evans and O'Leary, 'Frameworked Futures', p. 29, Table 2.
14. 12 Guardian., p. 44 (italics in original).
15. 13 The summated quiz scores have an alpha of 0.61, which for 6 items with dichotomous response categories is acceptable.
16. 14 The survey did not include a question on whether people thought the Agreement made the Union safe/unsafe or a unified Ireland more likely/unlikely.
17. 15 More detailed multivariate analyses identified which aspects of the Agreement most differentiated 'Yes' and 'No' voters. These will be considered elsewhere.
18. 16 Our sample results are consistent with the provisional analysis of actual votes by Richard Sinnott, who argues that the 'key tests here are UUP to SDLP transfers when the Alliance Party was not available, and SDLP to UUP transfers when Sinn Fein was not available. In the former case 36 percent of UUP terminal transfers went to the SDLP. Unfortunately [because of the counting data] there is no direct measure of SDLP to UUP transfers. [but one indirect measure suggests a] rate of transfer [that exactly matches that] going in the opposite direction': Richard Sinnott, 'Centrist Politics makes Modest but Significant Progress: Cross-community Transfers Were Low', Irish Times, 29 June 1998. Our sample transferred less (an effect of the artificial ballot in our design?), but in the cross-communal matching fashion suggested by Sinnott.
19. 17 An analysis of the possible sources of full cross-communal (Unionist to Nationalist and vice versa) switching in Assembly voting indicates that such voters are different in their attitudes towards the release of prisoners and the Republic's constitutional claim from non-switchers. They are also more middle-class, educated and supportive of compromise by their leaders.
20. 18 An idea first advanced by Richard Rose, Ian McAllister and Peter Mair, Is There a Concurring Majority in Northern Ireland?, Glasgow, Strathclyde Papers in Public Policy no. 22, 1978.
21. 19 Evans and O'Leary, Trameworked Futures'.
22. 20 In our earlier study we included the even weaker criterion of plurality agreement rather than simple majority agreement within both communities as an option -which again might approximate weighted majority support in the Assembly. No issue in this study required us to use this weaker criterion to generate something approximating cross-community consensus, so it is not employed here.
23. 21 The Omagh bombing occurred almost at the end of fieldwork, so it will not have affected the vast majority of responses to these questions: after the bombing 26 addresses in the Omagh area were withdrawn from the survey and recorded as 'out of scope'.
24. 22 In 1998 Catholics did not in general endorse this practice. It could be that the Catholic position has changed since 1998, but it is more likely that this issue has become explicitly focused on Sinn Fein -who are explicitly referred to in the UMS question - rather than on the general principle of decommissioning and Executive membership examined in the 1998 survey.
25. 23 This level of support compares favourably with the answers to a similar question asked in 1998.
26. 24 Brendan O'Leary, 'The Limits to Coercive Consociationalism in Northern Ireland', Political Studies, 1989, pp. 562-88; cf. Erik A. Nordlinger, Conflict Regulation in Divided Societies, Occasional Papers in International Affairs, no. 29, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Centre for International Affairs, 1972.
27. 24 Brendan O'Leary, 'The Limits to Coercive Consociationalism in Northern Ireland', Political Studies, 1989, pp. 562-88; cf. Erik A. Nordlinger, Conflict Regulation in Divided Societies, Occasional Papers in International Affairs, no. 29, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Centre for International Affairs, 1972.