To win the people, always cook them some savoury that pleases them. – Aristophanes

Byelections are very distinctive contests that tend to produce interesting results. They are typically caused by a TD dying or resigning. We face two byelections next week in Dublin South-West and Roscommon South-Leitrim, due to Brian Hayes and Luke “Ming” Flanagan respectively winning seats in the May elections to the European Parliament.

A review of byelections in Ireland in the past three decades suggests government parties have fared badly in the contests, but this trend has been recently bucked by Helen McEntee (Fine Gael in Meath East in 2013) and Gabrielle McFadden (Fine Gael in Longford-Westmeath in 2014).

Internationally, Frank B Feigert and Pippa Norris show byelections are widely used to fill legislative seats that fall vacant between regular contests. They also note, however, that byelections have often been ignored by academics and have provided little grist for the scholarly mill.

In Ireland, there is an educational value to byelections in that it is easier to understand how the PR-STV system works when there is only one seat to be filled. Of course, it can be argued that as multi-seat constituencies are an essential ingredient of PR (a single seat cannot be shared proportionally), byelections use an alternative vote (AV) mechanism rather than PR-STV. However, the two contests next week will use the STV quota system and vote transfers, as ever, will be crucial.

Even though the loss of a single seat in a byelection will rarely bring down the government, byelections are important contests. As Dr Adrian Kavanagh has argued, parties selecting candidates for byelections need to think strategically.

Not alone will they be choosing a candidate for the byelection, they will also be attempting to groom a candidate who can use the increased profile of the byelection contest to try and secure a seat at the next general election.

For example, Tomás MacGiolla, Dick Roche, Joe Higgins, Brian Hayes and Paul Gogarty all lost byelections but won seats in subsequent general elections. Candidates representing the party or grouping that held the seat left vacant have a good success rate in byelections, especially if they represent non-government parties.

We know relatively little about issues that affect voting decisions at byelections. For example, the 2014 local elections were fought on a mixture of national and local issues. While there was a plethora of contentious local issues – such as road developments, pylons and halting sites – many people voted on the Government’s austerity policies and reduced the elections to a poll on the state of the economy.

Extremely localised

Even though the purpose of a byelection is to fill a seat in the national parliament, they to be extremely localised, unsurprising given that you are trying to fill one seat only from one constituency. Therefore, byelections can be fertile ground for single-issue candidates.

Candidates can emerge from interest groups or local community associations who can mobilise support across parties and socio-economic divisions in the support of one cause or issue. For example, the Roscommon Hospital Action Committee has a record of regularly running independent candidates at general and local elections since 1985.

Ultimately, as alluded to in the opening quote, elections are about cooking something savoury for the electorate, but people have diverse tastes and palates.

Turf wars

We know “turf wars” will play a significant part in the Roscommon South-Leitrim byelection, with Michael Fitzmaurice, chairperson of the Turf Cutters and Contractors Association, emerging as a candidate. With the backing of Luke “Ming” Flanagan who vacated the seat, there is every likelihood Fitzmaurice will poll well. Not only is turf-cutting a very real issue for many people, we have also seen in recent elections that the electorate favours independent candidates.

The aforementioned research by Feigert and Norris (though Ireland was not one of their case study countries) suggests two main theses for explaining byelection outcomes: “candidate-specific” or “government referendum”. The two byelections next month are likely to combine both dimensions, with specific local issues also thrown into the mix.

It is clear the byelection successes of Helen McEntee and Gabrielle McFadden had a strong “candidate-specific” element given the vacancies arose from deaths of family members. Accordingly, the “candidate-specific” thesis trumped the “government referendum” thesis and the Government enjoyed rare byelection successes.

Given that the byelections are significant but not critical (for the stability of the Government), the political parties can use them as dry-runs for the general election campaign. Byelections are important for the recruitment of new representatives, and parties, to some extent, can experiment in a single constituency with innovations in campaign strategies and tactics.

Ultimately, of course, the election is in the hands of the people of Dublin South-West and Roscommon South- Leitrim, and they possess varied tastes. Not everyone likes savoury food.

Dr Aodh Quinlivan is a lecturer in politics at the department of government at UCC, where he specialises in local politics. Blog: www.localdemocracymatters.blogspot.ie Twitter: @AodhQuinlivan