The Cedar Lounge Revolution

IT Polling data 2007 – 2011… August 18, 2011

There’s a great graph from the Irish Times in February of this year, published just before General Election, that’s been playing a bit on my mind over the past three or four months. As you can see below it depicts the polling data from IT polls from the General Election in 2007 through to February of this year. And it’s genuinely informative because it allows one to track (albeit clearly only in relation to IT polls with all the caveats that apply) the rise and fall and rise of various parties across that time.

What it also does is allow us to link the fortunes of the parties to events that occurred during the period. This isn’t fine grained stuff, more broad brush strokes. But it’s not a bad way to get a read on the broader dynamics across the period.

Let’s refresh our memories as to some of the key events that occurred during that period. The government came to power in 2007. All was well for a brief period. But, as these dates culled from wiki demonstrate, all went wrong.

Ireland officially enters recession in September 2008.

29 September 2008 – government issues unlimited bank guarantee.

Budget 2008 is brought forward from December to 14 October 2008.

Introduction of income levy.

22 of October 2008, march by pensioners at Dáil.

In January 2009 326,000 unemployed, the highest number since records began in 1967.

April 2009 – Supplementary Budget. Proposal of NAMA.

June 2009 – Local Elections

September 2009 NAMA makes first appraisal.

April 2010 – NTMA declares ‘no major refinancing obligations’.

September 2010 Banks unable to raise finance. Bank guarantee renewed for third year [government help rose to 32% of GDP].

21 November 2010 – request for support from EFSF and IMF.

23 November 2010 dissident FF TDs and opposition seek no-confidence vote.

28 November 2010 – EU/IMF agree €85bn rescue deal.

7 December 2010 – Budget vote.

April 2011 – Moody’s downgrades Irish bank debt to junk status.

Most obvious is the decline in the Fianna Fáil vote from June 2008. For the first six months after the 2007 election it was at or around the 40 per cent mark before climbing rapidly to 47 per cent in the Summer of 2008. From there it lost 15 per cent across 2008 to arrive at 32 per cent in November 2008 and then a further decline to 26 per cent in February 2009. It then fluctuated within a band between 20 per cent and 26 per cent through 2009 and 2010 before dipping again in December 2010 to the mid teens where it remained.

There’s little surprise in the fall between June and November 2008. This was the period when the bank guarantee and Budget 2008 took place. As interesting is the drop between November and February, perhaps on foot of higher unemployment. Thereafter there it oscillated in the mid-20s before the IMF intervention saw it crash sub-20.

By contrast Fine Gael saw their vote fall from the high 20s after the election, quite precipitously in the Summer of ’08 down to as low as 20 per cent. But from there, between June and November it was a climb up to the 30s, and on occasion into the mid-30s. They fell back into the 20s over the Summer of 2010 when the Labour Party breached the 30 per cent barrier, but then began to climb again towards the middle 30s by the end of that year and on into 2011.

For Labour the situation was more complex. They remained a little above their 2007 election result of 10 per cent for the remainder of 2007 and all of 2008 before seeing their vote almost double in the first part of 2009. Then their vote fell back briefly to the high teens before consolidating in the low twenties, a position from which they stayed at or about 22 per cent through to June 2010 when their vote rose sharply upwards to 29 per cent and then 33 per cent (in both of which polls they overtook Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil for the first time). However by the Autumn of 2010 they had fallen back to the mid 20s and saw their vote declining to 23 per cent in February 2011.

Sinn Féin moved from their Election 2007 result of 7 per cent up to 9 per cent by early 2008 but then fell back to 7 per cent in mid 2008. However from there they slowly but steadily saw their vote share increase hitting 10 per cent in early 2009 and staying there until January 2010 when they fell back to 9 per cent. Between then and late September 2010 they remained with a band of 8 per cent and 10 per cent before rising sharply in December 2010 to 15 per cent (due to the success of Pearse Doherty in Donegal) and declining to 12 per cent by February 2011.

For the Green Party the situation was on the face of it more stable, they fluctuated between 1 per cent and 4 per cent throughout the period from 2007 to February 2011. But there was one very significant straw in the wind from after the 2007 election where their vote dropped from the 5 per cent they achieved at the election to 2 per cent in October 2007 and down to 1 per cent by the middle of the following year. That their vote could dip so low, unprecedentedly so given their rating pre May 2007 when they varied between 3 and 7 per cent following the 2002 general election indicated that a good portion of their base, such as it was, had walked away from the off and would only be grudgingly won back.

That said from late 2008 onwards they might have had some cause for optimism. Between then and mid 2010 they were on 3 to 4 per cent. Hardly stellar, but solid enough. But as if the electorate had grown wise to them by September 2010 they dipped to 2 per cent and from there it was downhill and by 2011 they were on 1 per cent.

Interestingly the Independent/Others vote was an inverse of the Green Party vote. When the GP was doing poorly the Indos/Others tended to do better, and vice versa. It would appear reasonable to posit that a good portion of the GP vote went to the Independents/Others when it went anywhere at all. Indeed what’s striking is how the GPs vote doesn’t clearly track either the FG or Labour votes, although it’s possible to suggest that in the May 2007 period to mid 2008 period some of their vote may indeed have gone to those parties as well as the Independents. But since they were the party with the lowest vote share across the life time of the Dáil it’s more difficult to parse the numbers.

Either way it was clear from October 2007 that there was significant trouble ahead and even though the GP vote recovered the fact that it had dipped so low in the first place was indicative of a sea change in their support on entering government.

It’s worth noting that the SF and Independent vote tended to parallel each other. Peaks in the SF vote are mirrored in the Independent vote and vice versa (with the exception of the Pearse Doherty election and after when the SF vote raced ahead of the Independent vote). It’s worth exploring that more deeply at some point, but it suggests a relationship either/and based on the protest vote that each address and a left wing vote as well. It also suggests that both were capturing Fianna Fáil voters, particularly when the FF vote fell below 20 per cent. It was then that Labour began to eat further into the Fianna Fáil vote taking a good ten per cent of their support between November of 2008 and February of 2009. And although that fell back a bit for Labour Fianna Fáil never quite recovered that back from the LP – although there was greater churn between FF and FG to judge from the volatility of both their votes between May 2009 and after. This churn between those two parties continued until early 2010 when it was replaced by a churn between FG and the LP. When that was resolved with FG ahead this saw yet more support flow from FF to both FG and Sinn Féin and Independents.

Indeed looking at this data, partial as it is, what’s most evident is how Fianna Fáil saw their vote collapse in three different stages. First in late 2008 to Fine Gael. Then in early 2009 to Labour and then in late 2010 to Fine Gael, Independents and Sinn Féin.

By the end a good 30 per cent of their vote had been stripped away by others with FG and Labour taking the lions share and around 10 per cent apiece but Independents and SF both pulling perhaps 5 per cent each.

The final vote shares at the election? Fine Gael at 36.1 per cent, a gain of two or three per cent from the last poll on the chart. Labour at 19.4 per cent, down 5 per cent. Fianna Fáil recovered slightly 17.4 per cent. Sinn Féin lost almost 3 per cent going to 9.9 per cent. Independents added .4 per cent while the Green Party clawed back almost a full percentage point to 1.8 per cent.

There’s a lot to reflect upon there. Most obviously that of the Fianna Fáil vote of 2007 we can hazard that a good half or more (LP, SF and Ind) went in a leftward (however pale pink) direction with around a third tilting rightward. Small wonder that the great machine that was FF collapsed so entirely. What was left at the 2011 election was the hard core of those who would vote FF through thick and thin. If one considers this whole process as a political experiment it is clear that we have one finding, that we now are all too aware of what the core FF vote was.

Oddly the Local Elections in June 2009 appear to have not had a significant direct impact, indeed counterintuitively the FF vote saw something of a recovery across the latter half of 2009 reaching the heady heights of 26% by early January of the next year – perhaps Fianna Fáil’s very poor performance and the effective removal of the Green Party at local level were merely part of an increasingly negative drumbeat that accompanied all else for those two parties, and there is the thought that it might have by allowing people who formerly might have voted for Fianna Fáil to become accustomed to voting elsewhere [though there's the caveat that local election voting has always been somewhat less constrained by party allegiance anyway]. So perhaps the effects of that were part of a cumulative process that took time to work through the system.

What’s also interesting is how the Sinn Féin and Independent votes were markedly less influenced by the events, they are of course smaller votes, but the variation is less, perhaps than one might have thought and the great events rather than seeing a flood of votes come their way saw instead a fairly steady accretion of votes across 2009 and 2010 with some fall off towards the end of that year before a marked upswing in early 2011 as disenchanted FF voters swung their way. So perhaps, tentatively, one could propose that their vote is less influenced by national events than might be expected. Not so though for Labour and Fine Gael who lived and died and lived again in reference to the broader economy picture and both of whose votes experienced quite significant swings.

And that underlines that there are real-world implications in all this – naturally. FF must rue the day they set the private sector on the public sector in rhetorical terms. All that overheated rhetoric broke links that were forged across decades. But beyond that they must rue the day they allowed themselves to be seen as so clearly centre right in their economic proscriptions breaking links with the working class in Dublin in particular. Those to were links forged across decades. Reestablishing them will not be easy if it’s possible at all (and one could add that the diminuition of the national issue does them no favours at all either since that glue is now long gone too).

But more importantly for FF to regain anything like its previous prominence it needs to pull all those constituencies back to it – from left, centre left, centre and right. That’s a hell of a task even at the best of times and with a fair wind. In a context where they were so resoundingly rejected and where the Government and other parts of the opposition will be keen to point to their central role in the economic crisis that’s almost unachievable in the short to medium term.

But there’s more. The fall of FF leaves that former FF vote out there to be taken. It’s near impossible to predict where it will go since the outline of the next three or four years is so difficult to discern. On the one hand it seems reasonable to argue that much of it won’t be going back to FF anytime soon, which on the one hand appears to be good news for Labour and Fine Gael. Certainly they both built up sufficient support in terms of vote share and numbers to make the likelihood of a second term post-2016 quite good even if they bleed support to the opposition. On the other hand that also suggests that the non-FF opposition may equally do well. Much of the vote that went to the LP might be ripe for harvesting by SF or the Independents and Others.

Just where did traditional social democracy go? August 17, 2011

I’ve been reading the Kevin Rafter book on Democratic Left: The Life and Death of an Irish Political Party.

Got to be honest. It’s interesting, even quite readable, but I’m not entirely convinced, and that’s in part from having a ground level view of the party during a fair chunk of the party’s existence. But a review will have to await another day.

Nope, what struck me was the introductory section which attempts to grapple with definitions of the left. Rafter throws a range of terms into the mix, socialism, communism and social democracy and declares that these are ‘strands’, but each is fairly unrefined. It’s unclear what he means by ‘socialist’ – whether that covers Euro-communist parties and others on the further left, and his point about social democracy, that it effectively became neo-liberalism (or accepted neo-liberalism to the extent that in political terms it was indistinguishable,) while correct in terms of the policy positions adopted by many social democratic and centre left parties isn’t true of the actual ideology of social democracy itself which even when it renounced Marxism, as with the German social democrats – as late as 1959 [which is remarkable in itself], remained distinct from centre right policy approaches.

Or to put it another way, it seems to me social democracy itself didn’t change even if (and as) its nominal adherents abandoned it.

As it happens I’d argue that this is one of the great flaws in centre left politics during the past thirty years, the abandonment of the concept of the instrumentality of the state by the social democratic left. And I don’t mean that in an unrefined fashion where statism is all, but more that the utility of the state to support left projects was simply discarded by the – as it were – ‘official’ social democratic left.

This had specific consequences that only now are becoming entirely evident. The idea that states could exercise a degree of ownership in commercial ventures, as through semi-states, is now regarded even by large portions of the self-defined centre left both here and elsewhere as utopian, and yet that was the model that operated here for much of the 20th century. This goes further. The idea that such enterprises could be made more efficient, improved, that they could genuinely be public services within public ownership was also lost – and one wonders if the lack of a case made for that by the social democratic parties indicated a diminishing enthusiasm for the underlying concept.

If so it was a grievous error because as we can see now the sole remaining area that could loosely be described as a functional element of the social democratic compact – such as it was, the broad area of the state itself is under threat as never before. That this occurs during the period where private enterprise has itself failed comprehensively across a range of sectors indicates the shallowness of that compact.

But what started me thinking was the political disposition of the current Dáil and the left within it. I’m talking broad brush strokes here – obviously, but we can see that Labour represents fairly clearly the modern ‘social democratic’ approach, one which in policy terms is functionally barely differentiated from Fine Gael. There are some differences, but these seem to be largely of emphasis rather than of substance. Those of us with longer memories will perhaps question when was it otherwise, but compare and contrast their platforms in the early 1970s, or even the early 1990s with what we have seen this last few months in terms of approach and tone and the gulf is remarkable [a friend of mine was at an academic conference recently where a political scientist argued that contemporary Labour on the strength of its manifesto was very slightly right of centre to the consternation of some attending - but consider how rhetorically at least the LP has repositioned itself distant from organised Labour, from the public sector, from those on social welfare and so on, all distinct areas of differentiation with pre-existing approaches and how actual policy implementation by the LP is hardly distinct from that of FG].

The United Left Alliance is positioned within the further left approach. That said the ULA having within it the capacity to become a platform party/formation is a rather modern manifestation of the further left.

But what’s fascinating is the question as to where is traditional social democracy in our polity?

In some ways Sinn Féin represents aspects of this. It has a clear identification with state endeavour, and this is useful for it not merely in and of itself giving it political definition distinct from not merely Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, and to a considerable degree in the contemporary period, Labour, but also because in a party which while left wing is clearly also fairly broad based it can shape an appeal that is recognisable even (or particularly) to apostate Fianna Fáilers, and one which potentially locks into a centrist/centre left approach to the state. After all, it was Fianna Fáil which in its most radical period was strongly interventionist and the justification for that was rooted in concepts which were far from alien to Republicanism in its Irish variant. This isn’t to suggest that SF is insincere in those instincts but simply to note that these are in some respects an addition to the mix (a process that we have seen many Republican formations go through across the 20th century) with all the attendant problematic aspects that that infers.

But I think another expression of older social democracy is found in amongst the Independent TDs. Some of these seem to me to belong, however nebulously, to an approach that would be identifiable as social democratic at almost any point in the 20th century.

There are of course deviations from that. Some come from community politics which has a somewhat different provenance – though that too can be seen in terms of activists involved and position to overlap with a concept of state sponsored endeavour.

Is this a good thing? Well, I suspect it doesn’t much matter one way or another. There’s no body of thought, no commonality of approach that underpins them and I can’t help but feel that this will be electorally problematic [though in truth hardly the only factor that will be electorally problematic for many of them].

Perhaps the best that can be said is that in some inchoate way, and this is true to a degree of both the ULA and SF votes too, their election represents a yearning amongst a not inconsiderable portion of the electorate for a left of centre – to varying degrees, compact. Whether that can be sustained across the long term is an interesting question.

Rafter makes great play on the lack of space for Democratic Left as a party left of Labour but right of… well, whoever… and how a merger with Labour was all but inevitable (it’s not put in quite those terms but it’s there). But if the history of Irish politics post-1999 indicates anything it surely is that there’s been plenty of room for both further left and traditional social democracy and indeed the Labour Party. Indeed if one casts the net wider one could argue that since 1980 there’s been a similar, if admittedly constrained, space in this state for such politics given the fact the Workers’ Party was able to carve out a clear niche as well.

What the current situation does seem to represent is that, as a distinct force unto itself in formations that have a clear lineage back to its roots, social democracy in its original incarnation is now scattered to the winds, even if the impulses remain strong enough to see proxies with aspects of it elected across a range of formations.