Abstract
A criticism of consociational power sharing as an institutional response to violent conflict is that it buttresses rather than ameliorates the underlying (linguistic, religious or ethno-national) divide, hence prohibiting the emergence of new dimensions of political competition (such as economic left-right or moral liberal-conservative dimensions) that are characteristic of ‘normal’ societies. We test this argument in the context of the illustrative Northern Ireland case, using data from expert coding of party policy documents and opinion data derived from two Voter Advice Applications (VAAs). We find evidence for a moral liberal-conservative dimension of politics in addition to the ethno-national dimension. Hence, we caution against assuming that consociational polities are unidimensional.
Highlights
A criticism of consociational power sharing as an institutional response to violent conflict is that it buttresses rather than ameliorates the underlying divide, prohibiting the emergence of new dimensions of political competition that are characteristic of ‘normal’ societies
We describe our sources of data (expert coding that we conducted of party policy documents and opinion data from two Voter Advice Applications (VAAs) that we produced)
When we feed the outputs of the exploratory factor analysis (EFA) into confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and eliminate items until the model satisfies our goodness-of-fit criteria,11 we find that one dimension contains economic issues, one cultural-moral issues, one sectarian issues and one issues on Europe (desirability of membership, EU powers, membership of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR))
Summary
A criticism of consociational power sharing as an institutional response to violent conflict is that it buttresses rather than ameliorates the underlying (linguistic, religious or ethno-national) divide, prohibiting the emergence of new dimensions of political competition (such as economic left-right or moral liberal-conservative dimensions) that are characteristic of ‘normal’ societies. In the Northern Ireland context, some previous research has examined the economic left-right basis of citizens’ attitudes, party positions and vote choice.
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