Political support and voting in Northern Ireland

Recently I wrote a paper with the snappy title ‘Political identity and support in Northern Ireland politics 1998 – 2006’, on behalf of Labour's Northern Ireland Constituency Council, for the Labour Party Commission on Northern Ireland. It’s an updated version of statistics from some work I did in 2005 at QUB’s Institute of Governance. I applied for funding for an action research project to try to bring together people from the different ‘third space’ political parties (neither nationalist nor unionist) in order to try to develop this aspect of Northern Ireland politics. We held a well-attended seminar at which there was clearly a lot of support for the project, but we didn’t succeed in getting any cash for it.

I recall a visit from an English charitable trust to which we’d applied. Their staff member, who dealt with all their Irish applications, asked some very pertinent questions and was clearly very aware of the issues. He was accompanied by an Englishwoman from their board of governors, who kept on asking why we needed money to get people to talk to each other. Put that woman on the Community Relations Council right now, I say.

Here are the summary points from the report, which covered the years 1998 - 2006:

· A substantial proportion of people, ranging from 30 – 40 per cent, do not describe themselves as unionist or nationalist. The proportion is increasing slightly over time.
· Over the same period, when asked which party they support, many people either support no party (between 11 and 26 per cent over the years) or don’t know (5 – 18 per cent).
· During the period 1998 – 2006, support for unionist and nationalist parties combined reached a low of 56 per cent in 2006 and never rose above 69 per cent.
· In elections, the 30 – 40 per cent of the population who do not support the communal parties reduces to a band of generally around 5 – 7 per cent who turn out to vote.
· There may be many reasons for this and turnout is not unusually low compared with other parts of the UK and with the Irish Republic. We cannot assume that they point exclusively to the possibility of a gap in the electoral ‘market place’.
· However, in 2005, 41 per cent of respondents had a lot of sympathy with the statement from non-voters that ‘I would have voted if there was a strong non-sectarian party’.
· It would be reasonable to conclude that at least some of the missing voters cannot identify a current political party they wish to support.

I’m a lot more cautious about the results than I was in 2005. As I say above, there may be many reasons why people in NI don’t vote, describe themselves as unionist or nationalist, or support a political party. One reason is the possibility that they don’t tell the truth to survey interviewers, a subject which is not treated seriously enough by social researchers. Still, there is a gap and that means there is potential for a new political party to gain support and votes.