Party images in Northern Ireland: evidence from a new dataset

John Coakley,John Garry,Neil Matthews,Brendan O’Leary

doi:10.1080/07907184.2018.1499621

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe literature on belief systems in mass publics shows that survey respondents typically have difficulty in describing their images of political parties; only about half offer a meaningful description of how they see individual parties. This paper investigates what people in Northern Ireland think that parties stand for in their home jurisdiction, in Great Britain and in the Republic of Ireland, using open-ended questions in a survey of 1,008 Northern Ireland residents. Northern Ireland respondents resemble those elsewhere, in that only about half seem able to offer a politically meaningful description of what local parties stand for. Among the more politically sophisticated, the Northern Ireland parties are described in ethnonational terms, the British parties are placed in socio-economic (social class and left-right) categories, but few respondents know how to describe the parties in the Republic of Ireland. There is an intriguing asymmetry in the characterization of Northern Ireland’s unionist and nationalist parties: the DUP emerges as only marginally more ‘hard-line’ than the UUP, whereas a great gulf exists between the SDLP and Sinn Féin, the former being perceived as much more moderate. Notwithstanding high levels of electoral stability in Northern Ireland, our findings show that party supporters vary greatly in their levels of political sophistication, perhaps allowing elites greater freedom of action than if all voters were highly politically informed.

Highlights

The very first issue of this journal contained an important article on ‘party images’ regarding Northern Ireland policy among parliamentarians in the Republic (Sinnott, 1986)
More than three decades later, we report here on a new survey that looks at party images from a different perspective, that of the Northern Ireland electorate
The last two bars consider Northern Ireland’s major source of division, but suggest that there is little difference between those of Protestant and Catholic backgrounds, with 55 per cent of the former and 52 per cent of the latter falling into the two highest conceptualization categories. These findings suggest that Northern Ireland is by no means unusual from a comparative perspective when it comes to levels of conceptualization of party images

Summary

Introduction

The very first issue of this journal contained an important article on ‘party images’ regarding Northern Ireland policy among parliamentarians in the Republic (Sinnott, 1986). More than three decades later, we report here on a new survey that looks at party images from a different perspective, that of the Northern Ireland electorate. This dataset permits us to link empirical. Findings regarding Northern Ireland to a broader literature on the belief systems of mass publics, in particular that of party images. Public perceptions of parties in Northern Ireland may be probed in a fuller way than has been possible since the landmark study of the older party system in 1968 (Rose, 1971). The topic is important, not least because people’s images of the parties constrain party leaders in their efforts ‘to structure political conflict’ (Sanders, 1988, p. 583)

Objectives

Findings

Conclusion