Irish Party System after 2011: Change or Revolution?

Abstract

Until recently the Irish party system has been considered as very stable. It was dominated by two rival conservative political parties, which only in the 1990s allowed the possibility of forming coalition governments with other parties. In 2011 there was a historical change – for the first time since 1932 Fianna Fail lost the parliamentary elections with the worst result in history. However, the classical parameters of the dynamics of party systems did not adequately reflect this transformation. In the article, we argue that without taking into account significant socio-cultural changes, the method of system analysis, focused on data obtained on the basis of election results, remains an insufficient tool to describe the Irish party system. We reconstruct the most important events related to the evolution of this system between 2011 and 2016 and try to answer the question of how relevant political parties reacted to changing patterns of competition.