Most of the commentary on the Nice referendum has been based on the assumption that the result represented a dramatic reversal in the attitude and behaviour of the Irish people on the question of EU treaty change. A dramatic reversal did occur between Amsterdam and Nice. But this was a reversal in the outcome of the contest, not in the underlying stance of the electorate.
Of course the outcome is what really matters. This was what decided the fate of the referendum proposal and put the Government (and, to some extent, Europe) in a pickle. This was, legally and constitutionally, the decision of the Irish people.
Self-evidently, it must be respected. But it must also be critically examined. Otherwise, the development of an appropriate response to the outcome (in Ireland and at the European level) could end up being based on the false assumption that there had been a quantum leap in opposition to EU treaty change among Irish people.
On the face of it the No vote increased by 15.6 percentage points - from 38.3 per cent to 53.9 per cent. However, as everyone is now well aware, this was on a very low turnout (of 34.8 percent - a decline of 21.4 percentage points on the 56.2 per cent turnout in the Amsterdam referendum of 1998). With a decline in turnout of that size, the only way to assess the behaviour of the electorate and to compare that behaviour across the two referendums is to look at the raw numbers of Yes voters, of No voters and of abstainers. In other words, one must look at the behaviour of the electorate as a whole.
Looked at in this way, the picture is quite different. Rather than showing an increase in the No vote, this simple analysis shows that the No vote actually declined between 1998 and 2001. The decline was very modest (down by 48,902 votes or 2.6 percentage points (i.e. the No to Nice percentage of the electorate minus the No to Amsterdam percentage). To have been able to sustain its vote at that level in the face of huge overall abstention was a very significant achievement by the No camp.
This was in contrast to the catastrophic decline in the Yes vote (down by 666,976 votes or 18.1 percentage points). However, the point that has tended to be missed, or at least not sufficiently taken into account, is that the No vote did decline. Consequently, to ask why the Irish people have suddenly turned against EU treaty change is to ask the wrong question. The real and the big question is why did so many people abstain?
A comprehensive answer to this question will require a combination of political reflection and systematic research. Even at this stage, however, we can push the analysis a bit beyond what can be learned from the national voting and abstention figures.
On the face of it, these might seem to suggest that, in comparison to the Amsterdam referendum, the Yes vote went down by 18 percentage points, the No vote went down 2 1/2 percentage points and abstention went up by just over 21 percentage points and that was that. However, because these are net figures they mask the real amount of movement between the various options (Yes, No and abstain) from Amsterdam to Nice.
Looking at results constituency by constituency for the two referendums is more informative but still faces the classic methodological problem of how to make valid statements about individual-level behaviour when the only data to hand are at the aggregate (in this case constituency) level.
However, methodologists at the University of Arhus (Denmark) and at Harvard University have recently developed new methods for tackling this problem. The Arhus method, which we shall use, seeks to identify the underlying patterns in the relationships between the various choices at the level of the constituencies and, using this information, to estimate the flow of votes from one referendum to another. It should be emphasised that the method only provides estimates.
Using this method, the analysis suggests that of those who had voted Yes to Amsterdam, over half abstained in the Nice referendum.
However, abstention also occurred, though at a much lower rate, on the No side. Whereas 36 per cent of the prior No vote seems to have stayed at home, a massive 53 per cent of the prior Yes vote did so. That turnout differential is by far the largest factor in explaining why Nice was lost.
It also appears that the Yes side only managed to persuade a third of its Amsterdam supporters to vote Yes to Nice and that, as vox pops and radio talk-ins suggested, there was indeed some movement from Yes to No.
That movement seems to have amounted to about 13 per cent of the Yes to Amsterdam vote, although one should also note that it seems to have been partially offset by the 9 per cent of 1998 No voters who voted Yes this time around. In fact the only really stable grouping were those who had abstained in 1998; almost 90 per cent of them abstained again in the Nice referendum.
There are several practical political lessons from all this. It is clear that the main reason for the outcome was the failure by the Yes side to mobilise its supporters, who, in the absence of such mobilisation or of sufficient and credible persuasion, stayed at home in massively large numbers.
Lack of understanding may have been a factor in this abstention but it was undoubtedly not the only one. It is likely also that the arguments of the opponents of Nice did make an impression on former Yes voters, leaving them feeling in doubt or under cross-pressure. Both conditions are known to lead to abstention.
There was also some movement from the Yes to the No camp, although, relative to the abstention effect, this was small and it was partially offset by movement in the opposite direction. This suggests that attitudes in this area are more volatile than they seem.
However, while accepting the constitutional reality of the rejection of the Nice Treaty, one must still conclude that to be concentrating on asking why the Irish people voted No is, from the point of view of political analysis, to be asking the wrong question.
Prof Richard Sinnott is director of the public opinion and political behaviour research programme at the Institute for the Study of Social Change at University College Dublin. Prof Sren Thomsen is a specialist in voting behaviour and methodology at the Department of Political Science, University of Arhus
Further information about the Arhus method may be had from: http://www.ps.au.dk/srt/multi/ thoms00.pdf. and http:// gking.harvard.edu/ei/node2.html