Political newbies, and Ireland’s rigged electoral system

The Irish electoral system, like almost every electoral system, is structurally rigged. In some cases, an electoral system – the British one for example – will be structurally rigged against small parties, like in 2015 when the Conservative Party won 330 seats on 36% of the vote but UKIP, which won 12% of the vote, got no seats at all.

In Ireland’s case, the system is not rigged against anybody, but it is very clearly rigged in favour of centrist, moderate, apparently harmless candidates. How so?

Your ballot paper, as a voter, encourages you to rank the candidates according to preference. Imagine an election in which there are five candidates: One each from the hard left and hard right, one each from the centre left and centre right, and one centrist. Each voter in the election is asked to rank the candidates – as Irish voters are – from one to five in accordance with their preferences.

It is very likely in that scenario that the candidate in the middle – the centrist – will get a very large number of number two and number three preferences, as voters go down their list of options. A socialist might start with the hard left, and progress to the centre left, and then to the centrist. Somebody on the hard right will do the opposite, starting with the candidate closest to their preference and working down.

Of course, that’s not how elections work in the real world, but it doesn’t mean the lesson is worthless. The easiest way to win an Irish election is to muster enough first preferences to be elected without needing preferences or transfers from other candidates. But for smaller parties in particular, getting transfers are the difference between turning roughly 7% into twelve Dáil seats, as the Green Party did in 2020, or turning roughly 7% into only seven Dáil seats, as the Labour Party did in 2016.

For an example perhaps more relevant to this article, consider the difference between Aontú in 2020 and the Socialist Party/People before Profit in 2011: Aontú managed one seat on 1.9% of the vote, whereas the hard left in 2011 managed four seats on just 2.2% of the vote. 0.3% of the first preference vote is not usually worth three additional seats. The difference was that our electoral system gives a massive seat bonus to candidates who can secure second and third preferences.

Securing those seats, as both the above examples indicate, is not simply a matter of ideology. The Greens, as observers of this Government might note, are amongst the most radical governing parties that this Republic has ever known, and yet the Greens have also been – historically at least – the masters at securing preferences from the supporters of other parties. They did this, it should be noted, not by broadcasting their ideology, but by hiding it in so far as possible and focusing instead on appearing unthreatening, well-intentioned, and cuddly: A vote for the Greens is a vote, in their telling, for cleaner water and protecting wildlife. Harmless. Which is why they have historically been able to hoover up preferences from voters who may well be appalled by the price of diesel under a Green Government.

People before Profit, too, are past masters at concealing their ideology. Their candidates do not, as a general rule, write on their leaflets that they are in favour of nationalising the local chip shop and abolishing national borders altogether, though both are their policies. Instead, they focus in elections almost exclusively on protest issues relevant to the voters in their area. They also make no bones about having a pretence at being in Government: A vote for them is a vote for a strong voice on housing or opposing the militarisation of Europe. In this way, there’s a conscious effort to make themselves a “safe” option for voters looking for somewhere to put their number two or number three vote.

If a criticism could be made of many of the new parties and candidates seeking election in the upcoming local and EU elections, one such criticism would be that too few of them are thinking about how to make themselves acceptable to voters whose first preference is committed elsewhere. Our electoral system rewards, structurally, candidates who do not – to use a phrase – scare the horses. Many first time parties and candidates, by contrast, often behave as if they exist solely and entirely to chase the horses from the paddock entirely.

So, to cite just one hypothetical example, there’s a significant difference between a candidate who says “We will seek the immediate deportation of every immigrant” and a candidate who says “I will be a strong voice for local concerns around rising immigration”. Or between a candidate who says “I will seek the prosecution of those who introduced vaccine passports” and a candidate who says “Irish politics needs more voices to challenge the stifling consensus that led to us enduring the longest lockdown in Europe”.

We have an electoral system that is designed, from the ground up, to reward moderation of tone. Understanding that is absolutely vital, if you want to succeed in it.