ABSTRACT
The phenomenon of the nationalisation of political behaviour is one that has been analysed in a number of contexts. By nationalisation we refer to homogeneity across a country, and a typical narrative is one tracing a process whereby local and regional particularities are, over time, overcome by a modernising wave that produces a single national polity. The phenomenon was identified by Elmer Schattschneider, who observed that, whereas early in the twentieth century the Republicans dominated the northern states of the USA and the Democrats the southern states, by 1932 there was something akin to two-party competition across the country (Schattschneider 1960, 89-90). The most widely studied aspect of political nationalisation concerns the party system and voting behaviour, where it has been shown that in Europe, for example, the predominance of local factors declined over a long period, especially in the nineteenth century, and elections were increasingly dominated by national parties and determined by national factors (Caramani 2004). Nationalisation is typically seen as part of a modernising process, brought about by processes such as the development of a national mass media and a national rapid transportation system, enabling a uniform party message to be disseminated almost instantaneously across an entire country in a manner that was not remotely possible prior to the late nineteenth century. Just as the advent of the railways put an end to local idiosyncrasies in the time shown on clocks (Robbins 1998, 37-38), so the railways, together with national newspapers and later radio and television, helped to make politics national politics rather than simply an agglomeration of local political worlds. In the USA, too, some have traced a gradual growth in nationalisation of the party system (for example Stokes 1975; as well as Schattschneider as cited above), though others maintain that the degree of nationalisation is not a monotonic process but, rather, ebbs and flows in response to political factors (for example, Kawato 1987, 1246-1247). In this chapter we will examine the question of whether political behaviour and the Irish party system have become more ‘national’ or more ‘local’ since the foundation of the state, and then survey patterns of party competition. For reasons of space the analysis will be confined to the post-independence southern state. A comparable analysis for the northern state might well produce rich dividends, though it would be complicated by the lower degree of continuity in the
party system, with the Ulster Unionist Party versus Nationalist Party competition of the first 50 years of the state being superseded by a very different party system dominated in recent years by the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Féin. In the context of this book, it is also worth noting that partition had a particular impact on politics in the border counties of the southern state, reflected both in the above-average support for Protestant independents at Dáil elections up to the 1960s (Weeks 2009, 11), and in the persistent strength of Sinn Féin in border constituencies.
