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

[calimac]

Isn't the Alliance in N.I. pretty much the equivalent - I think they may even be sister parties - of the British mainland Liberal Democrats? Which used to be called ... the Alliance?

[andrewducker]

They are really really not neutral on Scottish Independence.

[mountainkiss]

I am not 100% certain - hoping Patrick will show up and correct me if I’m wrong - but I think the Lib Dems in Scotland are an explicitly unionist party.

[danieldwilliam]

They are. When I hung out with more LD's they were in favour of significant devolution of powers across the whole of the UK. To the point where, with both Scotland and England inside the EU there was not much practical difference between the SNP's independence in Europe position and the LD's devo-max to the max position.

I'm not sure where the LD's are on decentralisation and devolution at the moment.

[andrewducker]

My experience is "We want federal. And we won't accept anything else."

And I don't believe we're going to get it, so I'm going elsewhere.

[danieldwilliam]

I've thought for a while that by the time the English realise their constitution is broken and they need to change other parts of the Union will have had enough of waiting for them and left.

[andrewducker]

I gave up in May 2011, as you know :-)