A quick graph on Northern Ireland voting patterns

[andrewducker]

Lots of noise about "Look at Sinn Fein! The Republicans are coming!"

So I grabbed the numbers from Wikipedia all the way back to the first NI Assembly vote in 1998, and it's quite clear that the numbers for Republicanism in general have hardly nudged in the last 25 years. SF+SDLP goes back and forth over the 40% line by a point or two.

The real story is that Unionists are slowly moving to Alliance. It's taking a generation or three, and past performance is not a guarantee of future performance, but if you look at where the figures have gone, that's why SF has moved into first place - not because Republicanism has taken mindshare, but because enough people have decided that Unionism isnt for them.



You'll have to excuse the fairly constant 6-7% of "Unknown" at the bottom. I wasn't going to go through every tiny party from the last 25 years and work out whether their 0.7% of the vote was Republican, Unionist, or Other.

For the record - Republican is SF and SDLP, Unionist is DUP,UUP, PUP, and TUV, and Other is Alliance, Green, and People Before Profit (who I'm fairly sure are Other, but am happy to be told otherwise, although it won't make much difference to the graph shape.

Comments

[doug]

Awesome, thanks for making that.

Did you deliberately invert the green/orange republican/unionist colours for lolz?

[symbioid]

Are the Other parties for an Independent N. Ireland?

[mountainkiss]

You are Dan and I claim my £5.

How does this compare with dynamics in Scotland? I find it quite plausible that independence support has remained consistent and union support has gone down. I recognise that the structure of parties is different.

[calimac]

Apparently there is an official "Other" designation for parties at Stormont, it means just what you use it to mean, and People Before Profit has it. According to its wikipedia page.

[coth]

Very interesting. Will you get the chance to discuss this with Nicholas Whyte?

[danieldwilliam]

Did you get a sense of how much the relative fragmentation of the Unionist vote in NI impacted the number of seats they won overall?

[bens_dad]

Not on topic, but if Sinn Fein had taken up their Westminster seats and voted on Brexit I doubt that the Northern Ireland Protocol would be in place. Has anyone taken them up on this ?

[hairyears]

That blue 'other' line reflects the orange (!) 'Republican' line very well indeed.

So much so that, I'd say that someone in that 'other' is acting as a magnet for people who are somewhat disaffected with either Sinn Fein or the SDLP, and moving out and then back again in a way that suggests that they remain aligned with the broad goals of the Republican movement.

Which is to say: that 'other' component probably consists of Republican supporters, and adding it in to the orange straightens it considerably...

And that, in turn, makes this all about the Unionists' loss of support to the Alliance Party.