World View:What we take most for granted is often what makes us most distinctive, writes Paul Gillespie.
Nowhere does this apply more in Ireland than during general election campaigns. Although professionalised techniques are used more and more at the national level, in constituencies all concerned insist that personal contact involving candidates and party workers canvassing voters is the key to electoral success. This is for most of them the kernel of campaigning - and it has lately been extended to longer and longer periods before the actual voting, as candidates ruefully admit.
Comparative political research reveals that Ireland has the highest amount of such contact among representative democracies. More than half the electorate who voted in 2002 reported that a candidate called to the house and over half also reported being contacted by a party worker. Almost 80 per cent of voters received one or other of these. The same pattern was found in the 1999 European Parliament elections.
This is a much higher figure than elsewhere, based on face-to-face rather than telephone contact. In a table based on the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, an international data archive including 23 states, Ireland scores highest for personal contact at 56.3 per cent, the United States at 47.4, Iceland at 28.3 and Belgium at 28.1. Among older democracies, Spain was at 5.8, France at 6.9 and Sweden at 7 per cent come bottom of this list. Among newer democracies only Brazil at 48.9 per cent comes near Ireland. Separate studies put the UK at about 25 per cent. This archive does not distinguish between face-to-face and telephone contact, so it probably underestimates Ireland's distinctiveness.
The information about personal contact is drawn from the Irish Election Study, an important research programme on the 2002 general election based on a survey of voters carried out just after it. Using a sample of 2,600 it asked a wide range of questions about the campaign, party identification and voter choice. These have been studied to reveal information about a variety of puzzles concerning Irish voting behaviour, including the influence of our distinctive proportional representation/single transferable vote system. This is also an international rarity, being used only here, in Malta and Tasmania.
The main researchers involved are Michael Marsh and John Garry of TCD and Richard Sinnott and Fiachra Kennedy of UCD (for details see http://www.tcd.ie/Political_Science/Staff/Michael.Marsh/ElectionStudy/). The study is being continued this year, based on a post-election survey interviewing the same people as in 2002 again, together with a top-up sample to ensure the 2007 study remains representative. It is a major information resource on Irish politics, which will enable much more accurate analysis of our political behaviour in coming years.
There was a steep decline in party identification in 2002, with 25 per cent saying they were close to a particular party, compared to 60 per cent before. Parties are homogenising towards the centre, a trend confirmed by findings that political beliefs tend to cluster or overlap between different political families. Although there are cleavages between groups of voters, these do not follow the left-right polarisations well established elsewhere in Europe, largely because Fianna Fáil straddles the middle ground of the party system.
Levels of contact between voters and politicians between elections are also comparatively high, with one fifth of the electorate having done so between 1997 and 2002 - about 637,000 people in all. These are patterned too, with middle-aged people most likely to do so; most of them are satisfied with the experience, since 88 per cent say they would do it again if necessary.
Political scientists are suspicious of windy generalisations about clientelism, based on a permanent dependency between voters and individual politicians, as the bane of Irish political life. They argue that politicians rather play a brokerage role between voters, bureaucracy and government.
This may change as new technology provides more information for citizens, but a major factor is the weakness of regional and local government here which could mediate between local and central levels. The casework loads of Belgian MPs declined sharply when federalism was introduced in the mid-1990s, for example.
Face-to-face contact and canvassing are intimately connected to the PR/STV system, of course. Candidates have to compete within their parties as well as between them; and because of the multiseat constituencies this has geographical consequences as well as individual ones. Ruairí Quinn says he finds election observer groups coming from the Labour Party's sister organisations in the Party of European Socialists are astonished at the level of constituency activity necessary to win elections here. Most of them use national list systems in which intra-party competition is displaced from constituency to national level and concerns one's ranking on the party list. Constituency work is not thereby eliminated but applies more between elections than during them in other democratic states.
There have been several attempts to abolish or amend the PR/STV system, based on the idea that it is responsible for Ireland's personalised and localised political culture and that a reformed system, probably combining single member constituencies with party lists, would allow for more effective parliamentary scrutiny of national legislation.
The question was examined in depth by the Constitution Review Group in 1996 and then by the follow-on All Party Oireachtas Committee on the Constitution in 2002. Its conclusion is worth recalling: "The fundamental and insurmountable argument against change is that the current Irish electoral system provides the greatest degree of voter choice of any available voter. A switch to any other system would reduce the power of the individual voter".
Michael Marsh, in his study of grassroots campaigning in 2002, concludes that the links between support and contact remain pronounced and make a real difference, especially for candidates. His article is entitled "None of that postmodern stuff around here", cautioning against any assumption that centralised methods are replacing local ones. It may well be that individual voters here also top international measurements of satisfaction with their political system precisely because of this high sense of choice - despite declining election turnout.