Managing Change: Party Competition in the New Ireland

Abstract

Ireland represents a useful case for studying political parties and their strategies as independent variables. In a context of unprecedented social and economic change, party leaders have demonstrated unusual organisational creativity in adopting strategies to manage the political consequences of these changes. While the potential for new issues, cleavages and parties surely exists in this changing environment, and while elections have been hotly contested in the recent era of increasing floating voters and declining party membership, the traditional political parties have maintained their overall electoral dominance through it all. They have done so by systematically removing potentially contentious issues from the domain of electoral politics. This article is about political agency, focusing on the strategic choices of political party entrepreneurs. The current Irish party literature’s emphasis on electoral outcomes fails to appreciate sufficiently the various ways parties adopt strategies along electoral, ideological and organisational dimensions. As a result, the recent literature has understated longer term continuity present in the patterns of party competition.