ABSTRACT

Introduction In this chapter I examine the support base of Sinn Féin, north and south of the border. Sinn Féin is a fascinating illustrative case of how the same party campaigns for votes in two distinct jurisdictions. Although an all-island party, Sinn Féin faces different electoral challenges in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Crucially the context is very different in the two states. In terms of political institutions, while Republic of Ireland operates a conventional model of government formation, Northern Ireland operates post-conflict consociational power sharing arrangements, with implications for the relative importance of the ethno-national dimension at election time. In terms of economic context, while both polities have experienced ‘austerity’ in recent years, in the Republic of Ireland much more drastic measures have been necessary (involving monetary bailouts given the effective bankruptcy of the state), with implications for the relative electoral importance of the economic policy dimension. Sinn Féin has a long standing reputation as being socialist on economics and nationalist on ethno-national issues (Bean 2007; Maillot 2005). One would therefore expect voters for Sinn Féin to be on the economic left and to be nationalist. However, given the political and economic contextual differences North and South I hypothesise that the relative significance of the two dimensions will vary: Sinn Féin is likely to be supported (or opposed) on the basis of its nationalist reputation in the North, and Sinn Féin is likely to be supported (or opposed) on the basis of its socialist reputation in the South. I elaborate and test these hypotheses using merged data from the 2011 Irish National Election Study and the 2011 Northern Ireland Assembly Election Study. I discuss the implications of the findings for our understanding of context driven North-South variation in electoral evaluation of Sinn Féin. I also discuss the potential for future research to utilise the ‘natural experiment’ of a single party competing in both polities on the island to understand further contextual determinants of political behaviour.