How votes are cast thousands of miles away today will directly affect the everyday lives of Irish citizens, writes Elaine Byrne
HAPPY ELECTION Day! Irish elections are normally held on Irish soil but every four years we make the constitutional exception to have one in America. Well, kind of. An Irish Timesletter writer was having none of it last Saturday. "I cannot vote for either candidate; I have no right to work or live in the United States. . . So why are my taxes helping to fund RTÉ's coverage of a US election in such minute detail?"
Because, my friend, this is modern democracy. How votes are cast thousands of miles away today will directly affect the everyday lives of Irish citizens. In his 35-minute television commercial on Wednesday night, Barack Obama made this very clear. "As president, here's what I'll do. . . eliminate tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas." You might not have the right to work in America but you do have the right to work in an American company in Ireland. . . for the time being at least.
Today's election will determine the shape of Irish elections to come, as they have in the past. The late Séamus Brennan, then general secretary of Fianna Fáil, went to the US to observe the 1976 Jimmy Carter presidential campaign. Brennan introduced the razzmatazz of American elections to the 1977 general election which forever modernised Irish electioneering.
The influence of professional American election strategists is well established in Irish elections. The media consultancy company Shrum Devine Donilon, which worked on Al Gore's presidential bid, has been retained by Fianna Fáil since the 1997 general election. Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, behind the successful presidential election for Bill Clinton, has advised Fine Gael since 2002.
All this costs money - which political parties do not have. The Lisbon referendum painfully exposed this weakness. Libertas, in its first foray into political territory, outspent all the political parties combined in an exceptionally professional campaign. In the next four years, political parties face into five potentially expensive national campaigns: the 2009 local and European elections, the 2011 presidential election, possibly another Lisbon referendum and, if they make it that far, the 2012 general election.
What now for political parties?
Media satire, particularly NBC television's Saturday Night Liveprogramme, has had a profound impact on public perceptions towards Sarah Palin. Will satire become more professionalised and prominent in Irish elections? There's a website, www.michelleobamawatch.com, which is a repository of media coverage devoted to Obama's wife, Michelle. Perhaps future elections will see Mary Cowen or Fionnuala Kenny receive greater attention. The blogosphere, with an ability to transform a fleeting remark into an uncontainable political crisis, will attract increased attention.
Apart from the razzmatazz, the expensive campaigns and the media influence, why will people vote the way they will today? Psychologist Prof Jonathan Haidt, University of Virginia, has identified five fundamental moral values or foundations that form the basis of our political choices (see www.ted.com).
(1) Harm/care underlines virtues of kindness, gentleness and nurturing;
(2) Fairness/reciprocity generates ideas of justice, rights and autonomy;
(3) Ingroup/loyalty emphasises patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group;
(4) Authority/respect stresses the virtues of leadership, including deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions; and
(5) Purity/sanctity underlies religious notions of striving to live in a more noble way.
Haidt believes that the personality traits of individuals, for example what they eat and read, determines whether they are liberal or conservative and consequently why they are more predisposed to vote Democrat or Republican. A voter who has a high tolerance towards "openness" to experience, Haidt argues, is more likely to vote Democrat than someone who prefers a familiar, safe and dependable environment.
Your dog can tell a lot about your voting patterns too.
A questionnaire developed by Haidt found that liberals were more likely to get a dog that was "independent-minded and relates to its owner as a friend and equal". Conservatives, he found, preferred dogs that were "extremely loyal to its home and family, and doesn't warm up quickly to strangers." What kind of dogs do Irish politicians have?
The crux of the disagreement between liberals and conservatives is, for Haidt, the rejection by liberals of three moral foundations: loyalty, authority and sanctity. In other words, liberals speak for the weak and oppressed and want change and justice, even at the risk of chaos. Conservatives speak for institutions and traditions and want order, even at cost to those at the bottom.
This distinction between change and stability, liberal and conservative, was made by Paul Krugman, recent winner of the Nobel Prize for economics. In The Conscience of a Liberal, Krugman wrote that conservatism was not necessarily "in the sense of right-wing views, but in the sense of reluctance to support big changes in government policies unless the existing policies are obviously failing".
What does this all say about Irish voting habits? Colm Tóibín, in last month's New York Review, wrote that Obama discovered his "essential Americanness outside America" through the Kenyan home of his father. Maybe having an election outside of Ireland every four years helps us to discover what we (and our dogs) essentially believe in.