The Irish Voter provides the first comprehensive, academic survey of the motives, outlook, and behavior of voters in the Republic of Ireland. It explores long-term influences on voter choice, the economy, party leaders, and the candidates themselves. It also examines how vote and why many do not vote at all. Findings are assessed both within an Irish and a more comparative context. Ireland uses an electoral system that gives voters an unusual degree of freedom to pick the candidates they prefer: the single transferable vote. Attachment to parties is very low, differences between them are often obscure, candidate profiles are very high, and turnout is falling rapidly. However, Irish elections buck international trends as campaigns rely very heavily on personal contact between parties and the voters.

This textbook explores voting behaviour in Irish general elections and referendums since independence in 1922. By interpreting the latest survey, opinion poll and statistical data for the non-psephologist, Richard Sinnott explores how and why Irish voters' preferences have changed, and asks whether the 1922 general election has heralded a fundamental realignment in the Irish political system.

This book is the 9th volume in the established How Ireland Voted series and provides the definitive story of Ireland’s mould-breaking 2020 election. For the first time ever, Sinn Féin won the most votes, the previously dominant parties shrank to a fraction of their former strengths, and the government to emerge was a coalition between previously irreconcilable enemies. For these reasons, the election marks the end of an era in Irish politics. This book analyses the course of the campaign, the parties’ gains and losses, and the impact of issues, especially the role of Brexit. Voting behaviour is explored in depth, with examination of the role of issues and discussion of the role of social cleavages such as class, age and education. The process by which the government was put together over a period of nearly five months is traced through in-depth interviews with participants. And six candidates who contested Election 2020 give first-hand reports of their campaigns.

At 7.20pm on 23rd May 2015, in the courtyard of Dublin Castle, Ireland truly became a nation of equals. Ireland Says Yes is the fast-paced narrative account of all the drama, excitement and highs and lows of the last 100 days of the extraordinary campaign for a Yes vote in the 2015 Marriage Equality Referendum. Those who led the Yes Equality campaign tell the inside story of how the referendum was won, and how Ireland’s two principal gay and lesbian rights organisations put together the most effective and successful civic society campaign ever launched in Irish politics. As well as a drama-packed chronological account of how the Yes campaign was executed, the book explores how social media mobilised a new generation of voters to the polls and how political parties, student unions and youth groups co-ordinated their efforts to deliver one of the most historic referendum results in Irish political history.

This is the definitive study of the Irish general election of 2016 – the most dramatic election in a generation, which resulted in the worst electoral outcome for Ireland’s established parties, the most fractionalized party system in the history of the state, and the emergence of new parties and groups. These outcomes follow a pattern seen across a number of Western Europe’s established democracies in which the ‘deep crisis’ of the Great Recession has wreaked havoc on party systems. The objective of this book is to assess this most extraordinary of Irish elections both in its Irish and wider cross-national context. With contributions from leading scholars on Irish elections, and using a unique dataset – the Irish National Election Study 2016 – this volume explores voting patterns at Ireland’s first post crisis election and it considers the implications for the electoral landscape and politics in Ireland.

This book examines Irish voting behaviour in the first decades of this century, with a particular focus on the 2011 election - an election held at a time of deep economic crisis.

This landmark book, reissued with a new foreword to mark the centenary of Irish women being granted the right to vote, is the first comprehensive analysis of the Irish suffrage movement from its mid-nineteenth-century beginnings to when feminist militancy exploded on the streets of Dublin and Belfast in the early twentieth century. Younger, more militant suffragists took their cue from their British counterparts, two of whom travelled to Ireland to throw a hatchet into the carriage of Prime Minister Herbert Asquith on O’Connell Bridge in 1912 (missing him but grazing Home Rule leader John Redmond, who was in the same carriage; both politicians opposed giving women the Vote). Despite such dramatic publicity, and other non-violent campaigning, women’s suffrage was a minority interest in an Ireland more concerned with the issue of gaining independence from Britain. The particular complexity of the Irish struggle is explored with new perspectives on unionist and nationalist suffragists and the conflict between Home Rule and suffragism, campaigning for the vote in country towns, life in industrial Belfast, conflicting feminist views on the First World War, and the suffragist uncovering of sexual abuse and domestic violence, as well as the pioneering use of hunger strike as a political tool. The ultimate granting of the franchise in 1918 represented the end of a long-fought battle by Irish women for the right to equal citizenship, and the beginning of a new Ireland that continues to debate the rights and equality of its female citizens.

From JFK to Trump, Irish American voters have played a pivotal role in US politics, but is their influence on the wane? The Tribe provides a definitive, clear-eyed look at Irish American voters.

The campaign for women's votes in Ireland coincided with the nationalist movement, the First World War, the rise of the trade union movement, the cultural revival and, of course, the 1916 Rising. It culminated in 1918, with Ireland electing the first woman to parliament in London. However, the Irish suffrage movement was not a single-issue group. It did not merely campaign for votes, but also presented a feminist critique of the plight of Irish women in early twentieth-century society. The Irish Citizen newspaper, as the voice of the suffrage movement, provides an important insight into the various campaigns and concerns of this fascinating movement. The paper was self-consciously feminist, and, in addition to covering the major events of this tumultuous period, it addressed taboo subjects like rape, domestic violence, and child abuse. This book brings together extracts from the paper with analysis, commentary, and informative contextual background. First published in 1996 by Folena as "Irish Feminism and the Vote", this new edition has been comprehensively updated and revised. [Subject: Gender Studies, Suffrage Movement, Irish Studies, 20th C. Studies, History, Media Studies]