ABSTRACT
Through the application of content analysis, this chapter examines the election campaigns of political parties in Northern Ireland using an ethno-symbolic lens in order to elucidate the extent of any moderation in the post-Good Friday Agreement era. It analyses the manifestos of the DUP, the Ulster Unionist Party, Sinn Fein, the Social Democratic and Labour Party, the Progressive Unionist Party, and the Alliance Party. First, a general overview of pre-Good Friday Agreement manifestos is included to provide an indication of the focus of these campaigns. Then, manifestos from the 2010 Westminster Parliament election, the 2011 Northern Ireland Assembly and local elections, and the 2014 European Parliament and local elections are analysed. This, first, allows the examination of manifestos from more than a decade after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, with its provisions having had a significant amount of time to become entrenched. Second, analysing manifestos for these elections enables the exploration of campaign literature for elections to all levels of government in Northern Ireland, including those contested using PR-STV and those that are not. The purpose of this chapter is to gauge the extent to which many of the ethno-symbolic characteristics identified in Chapter 1 are utilised by parties in their election campaigns. It concludes that little campaign moderation has taken place, and that parties are not actively attempting to attract transfer votes from the opposite communal bloc, which in turn suggests that unionist and nationalist identities remain highly salient in Northern Ireland, with a genuinely shared common identity showing little or no sign of being realised.
