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Beyond the dominant party system: the transformation of party politics in Northern Ireland
ABSTRACT
For almost a century, unionists won a majority of seats in every election to Northern Ireland’s regional parliament or assembly. That unbroken run came to an end in March 2017 when unionists became a minority in the Northern Ireland Assembly for the first time. Much scholarly analysis of this new dispensation characterises it as part of a long-term shift away from the binary politics of ethnonational division and majoritarianism as support grows for parties aligned with neither unionism nor nationalism. This paper offers an alternative analysis that emphasises the persistent importance of constitutionally related majorities. It argues that the emergence in 2017 of a non-unionist majority in the Assembly removed the last vestiges of a dominant party system that had endured in one form or another since the establishment of Northern Ireland. It marks the birth of a new party system, bringing about a much more fundamental shift in the dynamics of political competition than is generally understood. Rather than moving the politics of Northern Ireland beyond constitutional questions, it brings those questions to the forefront, with profound implications for the long-term relationship between Northern Ireland on one hand and the Republic of Ireland and Great Britain on the other.
Majority no more
For almost a century unionists won a majority of seats in every election to Northern Ireland’s regional parliament or assembly. That unbroken run ended in March 2017 when unionists took just 40 of the 90 seats available. The impact of this turning point was reinforced by the May 2019 European Parliament elections when unionists – who had always taken two of the three Northern Ireland seats – were reduced to just one; and the December 2019 Westminster elections in which unionists were reduced for the first time to a minority among Northern Ireland’s 18 MPs. The era of assured and predictable unionist majorities had ended, several years after the unionist vote had first dipped below 50%. If unionists do manage to secure a majority in the Assembly again it is likely to be a one-off resurgence given the steady long-term decline in the unionist vote. Some scholarly analysis of the new dispensation in Northern politics characterises it as a move away from the binary politics of ethnonational division and majoritarianism. In this view the lines of tribal loyalty are beginning to soften as a growing number of voters reject the labels of unionist and nationalist (Tonge, 2020; Whitten, 2020).
This paper offers an alternative analysis that keeps constitutionally related political majorities firmly at its heart. It characterises the new political dispensation since 2017 as the removal of the last vestiges of a dominant party system and the emergence of an alternative electoral and parliamentary majority – a non-unionist majority – for the first time since Northern Ireland was established.
The term non-unionist refers to all political parties and candidates that do not embrace the unionist label. While this is a disparate group, it is politically meaningful because it provides the basis for an alternative working majority in the Assembly. The politics of the Republic of Ireland provides a precedent for a working coalition of ‘all others’. For many decades competition for government pitted the dominant party, Fianna Fáil, against ‘the rest’ who were unified only by the fact that they were not Fianna Fáil. Despite their often-wide ideological differences ‘the rest’ were able to come together and form coalition governments on almost every occasion when they secured a majority of seats (Mair, 1979, p. 453).
This profound shift in the party system in Northern Ireland is linked to, and reinforced by, the emergence of new cross-cutting cleavages on constitutionally relevant issues. There is still a pro-union majority that would vote to remain in the United Kingdom in any referendum on Irish unity, but there is also a pro-EU majority, a socially liberal majority (on touchstone issues such as marriage equality and abortion) and a majority favourably disposed to stronger links and cooperation with the Republic of Ireland. The quest to build stable majorities on issues related to the constitutional status of Northern Ireland remains a central driving force of Northern politics.
To better understand the significance of this new party system the paper revisits the debate on unionist majority rule prior to 1972 and offers a new reading of the electoral calculus that hindered the construction of an alternative non-unionist majority. I move then to examine the gradual emergence from 1997 onwards of a robust non-unionist majority in Belfast City Council, identifying some key features of the changed electoral calculus that would later emerge at the level of Northern Ireland as a whole.
The paper analyses the factors that contributed to the emergence of an alternative majority in the Assembly in 2017, including dealignment from core ethnonational ideologies, demographic change, and the emergence of new cross-cutting cleavages. It argues that the most significant change in 2017 was not the erosion of ethnonational identification but the construction of an alternative parliamentary majority that brought an end to a dominant party system – later a dominant bloc system – that had persisted for almost a century.
Dominant party system and ethnic party system
From the establishment of the Northern Ireland Parliament in 1920–1921, Northern Ireland had a dominant party system of an exceptionally strong type in which the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) formed every government for 50 years. The system was only ended in 1972 by large-scale violence and the breakdown of order. Research on the party system in Northern Ireland has long been dominated by the ethnic dual-party model elaborated by Mitchell (1995, 1999) and others (Coakley, 2008; Mitchell, Evans, & O’Leary, 2009; Mitchell, O’Leary, & Evans, 2001). The model – which is used to analyse post-1972 politics rather than the Stormont era – stresses competition between parties within ethnic blocs and sheds powerful light on key aspects of electoral competition, including the importance of reinforcing social cleavages and the pressures for, and against, ethnic polarisation.
References to Northern Ireland as a dominant party system, in contrast, are rare; just a few authors cite unionist majority rule before 1972 as an example, and they do so fleetingly (Crighton & Iver, 1991, p. 131; Mair, 1996, p. 96; O’Leary, 2019, p. 9). But the concept of the dominant party system has untapped potential for analysing patterns of competition in Northern Ireland well beyond the ending of unionist majority rule and is vital to appreciating the depth of the changes since 2017.
A dominant party system is one in which a single party dominates over a long period of time (Giliomee & Simkins, 1999). In its strongest version, the same party repeatedly wins a majority of seats in parliament and controls government over several elections, as the Congress Party did in India for decades after independence, and the ANC in South Africa (Bogaards, 2004, pp. 174–176; Kaßner, 2013). Sartori (1976, p. 174, 193–194), in his influential typology of party systems, defines the dominant party as the party that repeatedly ‘outdistances all the others’ (although he prefers the term ‘predominant party’).
Electoral dominance is not the only defining feature of dominant party systems, however. Duverger (1959, pp. 308–309, 312), the first scholar to identify the phenomenon, defined a dominant party as one that is consistently larger than any other party in the system over an extended period of time. But he stressed too that a party is dominant ‘when it is identified with an epoch’ (Duverger, 1963, pp. 275–280). Scholars have built on this insight to argue that dominant parties are defined in part by ‘the successful implementation of a historical project over a long period of time … [that] … significantly shapes the political culture of society’ (Kaßner, 2013, p. 31). It may include the foundation of a new political order: ‘many dominant parties … have been closely identified with the creation of the constitutional and political order that they came to dominate’ (Arian & Barnes, 1974, p. 595). The UUP was the dominant party in Northern Ireland not only because of its electoral support but because of its identification with the foundation of a new political order and the long-term project of establishing and maintaining Northern Ireland. Importantly, a dominant party does not have to enjoy an overall majority. It can maintain its parliamentary majority instead through a stable alliance with ideologically congruent ‘satellite parties’ (Blondel, 1968, pp. 196–197). I turn now to examine how Northern Ireland’s exceptionally strong dominant party system was sustained for so long.
Sustaining the dominant party system
The stability of Northern Ireland’s dominant party system prior to 1972 was not an automatic consequence of majority support for the union with Great Britain. It was possible to support the union while rejecting the ethnonational solidarity that characterised political unionism: to be both pro-union and non-unionist. For many scholars of the period, the great lost hope was the failure of pro-union parties that courted both Protestant and Catholic support – such as the Northern Ireland Labour Party and the Ulster Liberals – to ‘break the sectarian deadlock of unionist and nationalist politics’ (Buckland, 1986, p. 727). It was hoped that Unionist Party domination might be overturned by a non-unionist majority built on a foundation of voters who had freed themselves from ethnonational loyalties. Scholars focus above all on the Northern Ireland Labour Party’s successful inroads into the UUP vote in the early 1960s, especially in Belfast (Bew, Patterson, & Gibbon, 1979; Edwards, 2013; Loughlin, 2018; Walker, 1985). The failure to end Unionist majority rule prior to 1972 is attributed to the Ulster Unionist Party’s successful playing of ‘the Orange card’ to frighten Protestant voters back into the Unionist fold on the basis that all opposition ‘wittingly or unwittingly … helped Ulster’s enemies’ (Loughlin, 2018, p. 92).
But the vision of an alternative non-unionist majority constituted by voters who had freed themselves of their ethnonational shackles – expressed in the rhetorical attacks by Labour activists in the 1960s on both ‘Orange and Green Tories’ – obscured a blunt mathematical reality. Given that the large Catholic minority could be relied on to vote consistently for non-unionist candidates, a non-unionist majority dominated by the Catholic electorate and by parties and candidates associated with that community would emerge long before a non-unionist majority that drew more or less equally on both Catholic and Protestant voters. And however willing Catholics might be to vote Labour or Liberal, nationalist and republican sympathies remained strong among that electorate. The most plausible route to a non-unionist majority then was to build it on the foundations of the consistently anti-unionist Catholic electorate, allied to sections of the Protestant electorate who were willing to be part of a broader non-unionist majority.
The obstacles to constructing an alternative majority of this kind are neatly illustrated by the electoral history of a Stormont constituency that closely mirrored the overall population balance in Northern Ireland: the City of Londonderry constituency that covered the city’s Waterside and historic city centre. Just under 40% of the electorate here was Catholic and just over 60% Protestant and, as in Northern Ireland as a whole, the Unionist Party won every time. Unionist victory was so predictable that in four successive elections between 1951 and 1962 the UUP candidate was elected unopposed. This was part of a broader pattern in Northern Ireland where large numbers of seats were uncontested at every election due to the predictability of voter preferences (O’Leary & McGarry, 1996, pp. 123–124). But the failure to elect a non-unionist in City of Londonderry was not the result of unwavering loyalty to ethnonational blocs. Far from being a contest between Orange and Green Tories, in which voters remained loyal to their ‘tribe’, Catholic voters here showed remarkable promiscuity in party support and a consistent willingness to vote for any non-unionist candidate. In successive elections the vast majority of Catholic voters supported the Northern Ireland Labour Party (1945 and 1947), the Nationalist Party (1949), the Ulster Liberals (1965) and the Northern Ireland Labour Party (1968) against the Ulster Unionist candidate. Even when the Northern Ireland Labour Party was strongly attacking and challenging the Nationalist Party in 1968 it was still able to take the great majority of Catholic votes. But while Catholics were generally willing to vote for non-unionists regardless of political stripe, virtually no Protestant voters in the constituency cast their vote for a n...
