Building Bridges? The Political Implications of Electoral Integration for Northern Ireland

British Journal of Political Science

Volumn 26, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 123-140

  Duffy, Mary ^a   Evans, Geoffrey ^a  

^a NUFFIELD COLLEGE   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84937272566     PISSN: 00071234     EISSN: 14692112     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0007123400007444     Document Type: Article

References (27)

1. See the discussion in Arend Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies: A Comparative Exploration (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977), pp. 75-83. In the Northern Irish case this view has been proposed by Edmund A. Aunger, In Search of Political Stability: A Comparative Study of New Brunswick and Northern Ireland (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1981).
2. For example, Robert A. Dahl, Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy: Autonomy vs. Control (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 56-67.
3. Well-known proponents of this argument include Erik A. Nordlinger, Conflict Regulation in Divided Societies, Occasional Papers in International Affairs, no. 29 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Centre for International Affairs, 1972); Giovanni Sartori, ‘From the Sociology of Politics to Political Sociology’, in Seymour M. Lipset, ed., Politics and the Social Sciences (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), chap. 4; Adam Przeworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); and Peter Mair, ‘Explaining the Absence of Class Politics in Ireland’, in John Goldthorpe and Chris Whelan, eds, The Development of Industrial Society in Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 383-401.
4. Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 601. For example, Horowitz, referring to countries such as Nigeria, shows how ethnically-grounded political polarization can be reduced by providing electoral incentives for previously disparate groups to shift from their extreme positions. As he suggests, ‘the (institutional) rules can restructure the system so that the game itself changes’.
5. Hugh Roberts, ‘Sound Stupidity: The British Party System and the Northern Ireland Question’, in John McGarry and Brendan O'Leary, eds, The Future of Northern Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), chap. 4.
6. The current political system in Northern Ireland comprises five main parties, four of them ‘confessional’ parties, making the constitutional status of Northern Ireland their central political concern and appealing almost exclusively to either Catholics or Protestants, and one centre party. The unionist position is represented mainly by the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) and the more hard-line Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). Nationalist concerns are represented mainly by the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) and the republican party, Sinn F&n (SF). The middle ground is held by the bi-confessional Alliance Party of Northern Ireland (APNI).
7. Roberts, ‘Sound Stupidity’, p. 102.
8. For example, Max Beloff and Gillian Peele, The Government of the United Kingdom: Political Authority in a Changing Society (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985), p. 211. ‘ As evidence for the ‘cross-community potential for Labour polities’, integrationists point to the results of a recent CLRNI-sponsored survey in which, of the 1,100 Northern Irish people polled, more than half the Catholics and 28 per cent of Protestants were in favour of the Labour party fielding candidates in the region (see Mark Langhammer, CLRNI Spokesperson, quoted in ‘Majority wants Labour to fight in Northern Ireland: Poll’, Irish Times, 7 April 1993).
9. For example, Liam O'Dowd, ‘Social Class’, in Stringer and Robinson, eds, Social Attitudes in Northern Ireland (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1991), chap. 5. 1’ For example, the 1974 Sunningdale experiment in devolution and power-sharing met with resounding failure. The outcome of the current ‘peace process’, the result, in part at least, of the joint governmental ‘Downing Street’ initiative, remains to be seen. Although the cease-fire announced in September 1994 appears to be holding, there are clear signs that the negotiations will stall many times in the face of the mutual suspicion and hostility between the involved parties.
10. Ian Budge and Cornelius O'Leary, Belfast: Approach to Crisis-A Study of Belfast Politics, 1613-1970 (London: Macmillan, 1973), p. 365; Aunger, In Search of Political Stability.
11. Brendan O'Leary and John McGarry, The Politics of Antagonism: Understanding Northern Ireland (London: Athlone Press, 1993), p. 298.
12. An exception was the performance of Conservative party candidate for North Down, Dr Laurence Kennedy, in the 1992 Westminster general election. However, this middle-class and largely Protestant district is not representative of Northern Ireland in general. Dr Kennedy left the Conservative party in July 1993 because its ‘understanding’ with the UUP, which, he believed, encouraged ‘the perpetuation of religiously divisive polities’. See W. D. Flackes and Sydney Elliott, Northern Ireland: A Political Directory, 1968-1993, 2nd edn (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1994), p. 200.
13. John Curtice and Tony Gallagher, “The Northern Ireland Dimension’, in Roger Jowell, Sharon Witherspoon and Lindsay Brook, eds, British Social Attitudes: The Seventh Report (Aldershot: Gower, 1990), chap. 10.
14. O'Dowd, ‘SocialClass’, p. 47.
15. Kevin McNamara, Roger Stott and Bill O'Brien, Oranges or Lemons? Should Labour Organise in Northern Ireland? (London: Kevin McNamara, 1993), p. 21. Integrationists such as Roberts blame the failure of the NILP not on the failure of class politics, but on the refusal of the British Labour party to formally recognize the NILP as an affiliate and thus give it the political clout to ride the sectarian challenges and assert its socialist credentials. However, others see the NILP's demise as evidence of the intractability of the ethnic base of politics.
16. Social class was measured using the schema devised by Goldthorpe and colleagues (see Robert Erikson and John H. Goldthorpe, The Constant Flux: A Study of Class Mobility in Industrial Societies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992)). The schema was condensed to provide five classes: (1) the salariat (professionals and managers); (2) routine non-manual workers; (3) petty bourgeoisie (the self-employed); (4) foremen and technicians; (5) the working class (skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers). Since foremen and technicians tend to be similar to the working class in occupational characteristics and political attitudes, in the multivariate analyses these groups were combined to avoid problems with small cell sizes. See Geoffrey Evans, ‘Testing the Validity of the Goldthorpe Class Schema’, European Sociological Review, 8 (1992), 211-32.
17. Geoffrey Evans, Anthony Heath and Clive Payne, ‘Modelling Trends in the Class/Party Relationship, 1964-1987’, Electoral Studies, 10 (1991), 99-117.
18. A logit model is used because of the dichotomous dependent variable. With the Conservative party taking the value 0 and Labour the value 1, the model uses the maximum likelihood method to predict the probability of being a Labour supporter, given the explanatory variables. See John H. Aldrich and Forrest D. Nelson, Linear Probability, Logit and Probit Models (California: Sage Publications, 1984).
19. A measure of secularization is given by over-time increases in the proportions declaring no religious affiliation. Rose's Loyalty Study, carried out in 1968, reported less than 0.5 per cent of those surveyed as having no religious identity. See Richard Rose, Governing without Consensus: An Irish Perspective (London: Faber, 1971). In the 1989 Northern Irish Social Attitudes survey, this had risen to almost 12 per cent.
20. O'Leary and McGarry, The Politics of Antagonism, p. 298.
21. McNamara, Stott and O'Brien, Oranges or Lemons?, p. 9.
22. Rose, Governing without Consensus, p. 218.
23. Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1957).
24. See, for example, Brian Barry, Democracy and Power: Essays in Political Theory, 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 416.
25. Horowitz has recently argued, for example, that without the existence of various ‘moderating’ factors, some ethnic cleavages may be difficult to alter by any means. See Donald L. Horowitz, ‘Democratic Transition and Ethnic Conflict’ (Plenary address. Seventeenth Annual Conference of the International Society of Political Psychology, Santiago de Compostela, July 1994).
26. Ian McAllister and Richard Rose, ‘Can Political Conflict Be Resolved by Social Change? Northern Ireland as a Test Case’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 27 (1983), 533-57.
27. Brendan O'Leary, ‘The Limits to Coercive Consociationalism in Northern Ireland’, Political Studies, 32 (1989), 562-88