Consociationalism and the Evolution of Political Cleavages in Northern Ireland, 1989–2004

British Journal of Political Science

Volumn 38, Issue 4, 2008, Pages 699-717

  Tilley, James ^a   Evans, Geoffrey ^a   Mitchell, Claire ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD   (United Kingdom)

^b QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY BELFAST   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 69649107634     PISSN: 00071234     EISSN: 14692112     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0007123408000343     Document Type: Article

References (37)

1. Seymour M. Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (London: Heinemann, 1960); Seymour M. Lipset and Stein Rokkan, ‘Cleavage Structures, Party Systems and Voter Alignments’, in Seymour M. Lipset and Stein Rokkan, eds, Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-national Perspectives (New York: The Free Press, 1967), pp. 1-64.
2. Maurice Duverger, Political Parties, Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State (New York: Wiley, 1954).
3. Adam Przeworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 99-101. See also Giovanni Sartori, ‘From the Sociology of Politics to Political Sociology’, in Seymour M. Lipset, ed., Politics and the Social Sciences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969).
4. Octavio Amorim Neto and Gary W. Cox, ‘Electoral Institutions, Cleavage Structures, and the Number of Parties’, American Journal of Political Science, 41 (1997), 149-74, p. 150.
5. Richard Katz, A Theory of Parties and Electoral Systems (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); Kenneth Shepsle, Models of Multiparty Electoral Competition (New York: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1991).
6. William Riker, The Theory of Political Coalitions (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1962).
7. Matthew Shugart and John Carey, Presidents and Assemblies: Constitutional Design and Electoral Dynamics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
8. Lori Thorlakson, ‘Comparing Federal Institutions: Power and Representation in Six Federations’, West European Politics, 26 (2003), 1-22.
9. Though it is worth emphasizing, as others have done (see, for example, Stefano Bartolini and Peter Mair, Identity, Competition and Electoral Availability: The Stabilisation of European Electorates, 1885-1985 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 215), that the lines between these different perspectives are blurred and in practice many accounts are hybrid in character.
10. John McGarry, ed., Northern Ireland and the Divided World: The Northern Ireland Conflict and the Good Friday Agreement in Comparative Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); John McGarry and Brendan O'Leary, Northern Ireland: Consociational Engagements (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Richard Wilford, ed., Aspects of the Belfast Agreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
11. We describe this cleavage as ‘ethno-national’, following Walker Connor, Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), and John McGarry and Brendan O'Leary, Explaining Northern Ireland: Broken Images (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). We think this most accurately captures how and why voters are divided. Although the cleavage within the nationalist bloc might historically be described as ‘constitutional’, that distinction cannot be applied straightforwardly to unionist voters or parties, who are fairly unanimous in their constitutional preference to retain the union.
12. Geoffrey Evans and Mary Duffy, ‘Beyond the Sectarian Divide: The Social Bases and Political Consequences of Nationalist and Unionist Party Competition in Northern Ireland’, British Journal of Political Science, 27 (1997), 47-81.
13. Though it should be noted that the Framework Documents of 1995 were a marriage of the failed Brooke-Mayhew talks of 1991-92 and the peace process, in which officials split the known differences between the UUP and the SDLP. The Framework Documents were intended by both the Irish government and the SDLP to consolidate Sinn Féin's switch into normal politics (see Brendan O'Leary, ‘What Is Framed in the Framework Documents?’ Ethnic and Racial Studies, 18 (1995), 862-72).
14. Geoffrey Evans and Brendan O'Leary, ‘Northern Irish Voters and the British-Irish Agreement: Foundation of a Stable Consociational Agreement?’ Political Quarterly, 71 (2000), 78-101; Brendan O'Leary, ‘The Character of the 1998 Agreement: Results and Prospects’, in Richard Wilford, ed., Aspects of the Belfast Agreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 49-83; McGarry and O'Leary, Northern Ireland.
15. Donald L. Horowitz, ‘The Northern Ireland Agreement: Clear, Consociational and Risky’, in John McGarry, ed., Northern Ireland and the Divided World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 89-109.
16. Paul Dixon, Northern Ireland: The Politics of War and Peace (Basingstoke, Hants.: Palgrave, 2002); Rupert Taylor, ‘Consociation or Social Transformation?’ in John McGarry, ed., Northern Ireland and the Divided World: Post-Agreement Northern Ireland in Comparative Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 36-52; Wilford, Aspects of the Belfast Agreement. However, for a critical review of anti-consociational arguments, see Brendan O'Leary, ‘Debating Consociational Politics: Normative and Explanatory Arguments’, in Sid Noel, ed., From Power-Sharing to Democracy: Post-conflict institutions in Ethnically Divided Societies (Toronto: McGill-Queens University Press, 2005), pp. 3-43.
17. Paul Mitchell, Geoffrey Evans and Brendan O'Leary, ‘Changing Party Fortunes: Party Competition and Public Opinion at the Northern Ireland Assembly Elections of 2003’, ARK (Northern Ireland Social and Political Archive) Research Update, No. 33 (2005).
18. Adrian Little, Democracy and Northern Ireland: Beyond the Liberal Paradigm? (Basingstoke, Hants.: Palgrave, 2004).
19. Paul Pennings, ‘The Utility of Party and Institutional Indicators of Change in Consociational Democracies’, in Kurt R. Luther and Kris Deschouwer, eds, Party Elites in Divided Societies: Political Parties in Consociational Democracy (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 20-40.
20. Christopher Farrington, Ulster Unionism and the Peace Process in Northern Ireland (Basingstoke, Hants.: Palgrave, 2006).
21. Bernadette Hayes and Ian McAllister, ‘Who Voted for Peace? Public Support for the 1998 Northern Ireland Agreement’, Irish Political Studies, 16 (2001), 73-94; Bernadette Hayes and Ian McAllister, ‘The Erosion of Consent: Protestant Disillusionment with the 1998 Northern Ireland Agreement’, Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, 15 (2005), 147-68.
22. As we focus on the main predictors of partisanship within the two communities, this seems reasonable, especially when considering that in Northern Ireland the absence of a religious affiliation can also be associated with the lack of a political identity, see Richard Breen and Bernadette Hayes, ‘Religious Mobility and Party Support in Northern Ireland’, European Sociological Review, 13 (1997), 225-39.
23. See for example: Martha Abele Mac Iver, ‘Ian Paisley and the Reformed Tradition’, Political Studies
24. (1987), 359-78; Steve Bruce, God Save Ulster: The Religion and Politics of Paisleyism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986); Steve Bruce, ‘Fundamentalism and Political Violence: The Case of Paisley and Ulster Evangelicals’, Religion, 31 (2001), 387-405.
25. Geoffrey Evans, Anthony Heath and Mansur Lalljee, ‘Measuring Left-Right and Libertarian-Authoritarian Values in the British Electorate’, British Journal of Sociology, 47 (1996), 93-112; Anthony Heath, Geoffrey Evans and Jean Martin, ‘The Measurement of Core Beliefs and Values: The Development of Balanced Socialist/Laissez Faire and Libertarian/Authoritarian scales’, British Journal of Political Science, 24 (1994), 115-32.
26. This is perhaps unsurprising, as recent decades have seen more middle-class Catholics, see Mary Duffy and Geoffrey Evans, ‘Class, Community Polarisation and Politics’, in Lizanne Dowds, Paula Devine and Richard Breen, eds, Social Attitudes in Northern Ireland: The 6th Report, 1996-1997 (Belfast: Appletree Press, 1997).
27. These generational changes fit with theories of formative experiences, in which the political environment of a voter's youth influences partisanship throughout the life-course, as more recent cohorts have grown up in a political climate in which the DUP have been more successful. Unsurprisingly, given the more charged political atmosphere, the effects we see here in Northern Ireland seem stronger than those that have found been found for voters in the rest of the United Kingdom, see James Tilley, ‘Political Generations and Partisanship in the UK, 1964-1997’, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A (Statistics in Society), 165 (2002), 121-35.
28. Ian McAllister, ‘Political Attitudes, Partisanship and Social Structures in Northern Ireland’, Economic and Social Review, 14 (1983), 185-202; Evans and Duffy, ‘Beyond the Sectarian Divide'; Breen and Hayes, ‘Religious Mobility and Party Support in Northern Ireland’.
29. In an article focusing on the political behaviour of evangelicals in Northern Ireland in 1991 and 1998, Mitchell and Tilley have argued that a third social cleavage had become important, a moral liberalism-conservatism dimension, see Claire Mitchell and James Tilley, ‘The Moral Majority: Evangelical Protestants in Northern Ireland and Their Political Behaviour’, Political Studies, 52 (2004), 585-602. But we find that this appears to be a fleeting phenomenon, which is only apparent in 1998. For the four years (1991, 1995, 1998 and 2004) for which a similar liberal-conservative value scale can be constructed, we find that it is a significant predictor of partisanship only in 1998, and it does not affect the fundamental pattern of a waning left-right cleavage accompanied by a waxing constitutional cleavage. This can perhaps be explained by the transitional nature of politics in 1998, where uncertainty about the future prevailed and the consequences of institutional change were unclear. This is backed up by qualitative data, which suggests that the most religious Protestants immediately after the Agreement dealt with uncertainty by emphasizing religious rather than political dimensions of identity, see Claire Mitchell, Religion, Identity and Politics in Northern Ireland: Boundaries of Belonging and Belief (Aldershot, Hants.: Ashgate, 2005); Gladys Ganiel, ‘Ulster Says Maybe: The Restructuring of Evangelical Politics in Northern Ireland’, Irish Political Studies, 21 (2006), 137-55.
30. Evans and Duffy, ‘Beyond the Sectarian Divide’, p. 78.
31. Jocelyn Evans and Jon Tonge, ‘Unionist Party Competition and the Orange Order Vote in Northern Ireland’, Electoral Studies, 26 (2007), 156-67.
32. Neil Southern, ‘Ian Paisley and Evangelical Democratic Unionists: An Analysis of the Role of Evangelical Protestantism within the Democratic Unionist Party’, Irish Political Studies, 20 (2005), 127-45.
33. Paul Dixon, ‘The Democratic Unionist Party: Singing from the Same Hymn Sheet?’ (paper presented at the Political Studies Association of Ireland conference, Galway, 2001); Farrington, Ulster Unionism and the Peace Process in Northern Ireland; Ganiel, ‘Ulster Says Maybe’.
34. Denis O'Hearn, Sam Porter and Alan Harpur, ‘Turning Agreement to Process: Republicanism and Change in Ireland’, Capital & Class, 69 (Autumn 1999), 7-26.
35. Gerald Murray and Jon Tonge, Sinn Féin and the SDLP: From Alienation to Participation (Dublin: O'Brien Press, 2005).
36. Mark Ryan, War and Peace in Ireland: Britain and the IRA in the New World Order (London: Pluto, 1994).
37. On this point we refer to analyses of the 2003 election survey which demonstrate increasing cross-community support for mandatory power-sharing and decommissioning, and reduced fear of North-South bodies among Protestants: Paul Mitchell, Geoffrey Evans and Brendan O'Leary, ‘Extremist Outbidding in Ethnic Party Systems Is Not Inevitable: Tribune Parties in Northern Ireland’ (presented at the annual EPOP conference, Nottingham, 2007). Similarly, analysis of the NILTS in 2004 shows that less than half of Catholic respondents wanted Irish unity, and less than one in twenty would find it ‘almost impossible to accept’ if this never happened. Equally while 85 per cent of Protestants wanted to remain part of the United Kingdom in 2004, if the majority of people voted for a united Ireland, less than 15 per cent said they would find this almost impossible to accept. Evidence of less positive popular attitudes at earlier time points can be seen in Geoffrey Evans and Brendan O'Leary, ‘Frameworked Futures: Intransigence and Flexibility in the Northern Irish Elections of May 30 1996’, Irish Political Studies, 12 (1997), 23-47; and Evans and O'Leary, ‘Northern Irish Voters and the British-Irish Agreement’.