The Irish Party System Sistemul Partidelor Politice în Irlanda Assistant Lecturer Javier Ruiz MARTÍNEZ Fco. Javier Ruiz Martínez: Assistant Lecturer of Polics and Public Administration. Department of Politics and Sociology, University Carlos III Madrid (Spain). Since September 2001. Lecturer of “European Union” and “Spanish Politics”. University Studies Abroad Consortium (Madrid). Ph.D. Thesis "Modernisation, Changes and Development in the Irish Party System, 1958-96", (European joint Ph.D. degree). Interests and activities: Steering Committee member of the Spanish National Association of Political Scientists and Sociologists; Steering committee member of the European Federation of Centres and Associations of Irish Studies, EFACIS; Member of the Political Science Association of Ireland; Founder of the Spanish-American Association of the University of Limerick (Éire) in 1992; User level in the command of Microsoft Office applications, graphics (Harvard Graphics), databases (Open Access) SPSSWIN and Internet applications. Abstract: The Irish Party System has been considered a unique case among the European party systems. Its singularity is based in the freezing of its actors. Since 1932 the three main parties has always gotten the same position in every election. How to explain this and which consequences produce these peculiarities are briefly explained in this article. Rezumat: Sistemul Irlandez al Partidelor Politice a fost considerat un caz unic între sistemele partidelor politice europene. Singularitatea sa este bazată pe menţinerea aceloraşi actori. Din 1932, primele trei partide politice ca importanţă au câştigat aceeaşi poziţie la fiecare scrutin electoral. Cum se explică acest lucru şi ce consecinţe produc aceste aspecte, se descrie pe larg în acest articol. At the end of the 1950s the term ‘system’ began to be used in Political Science coming from the natural and physical Sciences. It was David Easton who first defined the theory of systems applied to the Social Sciences. A political system is ‘an analytical tool designed to identify those integrally related aspects of concrete social activity that can be called political’ (Easton, 1953, p.61) and therefore it is part of the social system. Likewise, Easton identified the central question of Political Science: how do the political systems persist and how do they change and adapt to the changes of the environment (Easton, 1965, Ch. 3)? The party system is one of the subsystems that structure the political life. It ‘is a pluralistic system of parts that forcibly express the opinion of the governed’ (Sartori, 1976, p. 29). Defining the concept ‘political party’ is not an easy matter. Indeed it has changed throughout the centuries and it has not been applied to the same kind of relatively-organised groups of people. We will use the concept related to the democratic systems of government, since this is what really concerns us here. A political party is an organisation which is mainly characterised by competing for votes in the electoral processes (Panebianco, 1989). It is important to focus on the idea of organisation, because an organisation is also a type of system in itself. Therefore, inside a political party certain processes are taking part, through which political demands (inputs) become public policies (outputs). We will call these inputs ideological demands and individual demands, and their corresponding outputs collective incentives (eg. a reform on taxation) and selective incentives (eg. a ministerial appointment) (Panebianco,1989, Ch 1). ADMINISTRAŢIE ŞI MANAGEMENT PUBLIC 3/2004 145 As an organization, a political party will be first interested in surviving. In order to attain such a goal there must be an inner balance between both inputs and outputs. Any imbalance will lead either to the split of the organization or to its extinction. Logically, political parties do not continuously maintain the same level of inner balance. This depends on both the inner changes in the power structures of the organization and the dynamics of the party system which they form part of, that is, the formation of and participation in government. Finally, parties as well as party systems are very sensitive to changes within the socio-political environment. The Irish party system has been traditionally considered as being unique among the European party systems due to the characteristics of the political parties which shaped it and also due to the nature of the period during which they were building up. We will be led, however, to speak of the ‘not so-amazing case’ of Irish system (Kissane, 1995). The analysis of the party system formation periods has been usually done following Rokkan’s theory of political cleavages (Lipset & Rokkan, 1967 and Rokkan, 1969). According to this, it is not easy to say which was the cleavage from which the Irish parties originated. We can identify two different moments in the building of the Irish party system. First, we find the pre-independence period. The political arena was divided between those seeking independence from the United Kingdom and those looking for economic class balance. Since the former overwhelmed in numbers the latter, the independence issue became the shaping cleavage. Thereby, we can identify a predominant centre-periphery cleavage moulding the system in this first historical moment. The main actor of this time was Sinn Féin which filled the whole independentist movement. Once independence was obtained (1921), the partition of the island, and the way in which this independence has been reached, became the most important issue in the political agenda. Sinn Féin suffered an imbalance which led it to split into two groups, one supporting the Irish Free State Treaty and the other rejecting it. Eventually this exacerbated crisis of collective incentives in the predominant organisation produced a civil war (1922-1923). The group supporting the Irish Free State Treaty abandoned Sinn Féin and founded Cumann na nGaedheal (1922), later called Fine Gael (1933). The other group retained the name of Sinn Féin and kept themselves out of constitutional politics. Otherwise, at 1927 Sinn Féin had split again and a group led by Eamon de Valera left the party to create Fianna Fáil and move into the constitutional arena. This new party, in the 1927 elections, succeed in coming second to Cumann na nGaedheal. From 1927 onwards these two political parties have always occupied the heartland of Irish party system. They have also been the parties which have obtained the most votes and by the 1932 elections Fianna Fáil had moved into the top position which it retained after this. According to Rokkan’s theory and limiting ourselves to the civil war, we could conclude that the cleavage from which the party system emerged is a non-conventional one. But if we focus on the electoral dimension the former conclusion does not seem to hold. Until 1927 when Fianna Fáil first entered electoral competition, the ‘Irish electorate were far from unanimous that the treaty issue was the most important one’ (Garvin, 1977, p. 169). However, this rapidly became the issue, particularly after Fianna Fáil’s entry into the Dáil. Nevertheless, ‘the dichotomy in which (the party system) was based was less the reflection of division in the community than the cause of them’ (Chubb, 1992, p. 92). ‘Ironically it was de Valera (...) who clear-headedly perceived that the Civil war fissure, though a deep and bitter one, would not inevitably reproduce itself as the fundamental alignment in Irish politics’ (Bew et al., 1989 p. 29). After 1927 Fianna Fáil’s language increasingly focused on the economic and social themes. At the same time Cumann na nGaedheal, the party of government, evolved towards very conservative positions. In its movement towards this increasing conservatism the party of government was helped by the Labour Party. This party came from the British political tradition and has always remaind as third party. It failed to place itself as one of the dominant parties, and was not able, more importantly, to attract the electoral support of social groups traditionally attached to the labourist and socialist movements. ‘The Labour Party chose the national approach which culminated in the severing of the 146 ADMINISTRAŢIE ŞI MANAGEMENT PUBLIC 3/2004 link with the Irish Trade Union Congress in 1930 to demonstrate that the party was more than a political appendage of the trade union movement’ (Bew et al., 1989, p. 36). Fianna Fáil through a very clever strategy quickly filled up the free political space left by the Labour Party. Fianna Fáil’s manifesto of June 1927 contained 12 proposals, out of an overall of 15, taken from the previous Labour Party manifestos (Mitchell, 1974, p. 224). ‘It is important to recognize that the intranationalist conflict between Fianna Fáil and the Cumann na nGaedheal was also complemented by a significant division on overall economic and social policy which acted to polarise the parties to an even greater degree’ (Mair, 1987, p. 17). The question of annuities would inspire the devotion of the socialist sympathisers within Irish society to Fianna Fáil electoral force. Fianna Fáil, from then on, would appear as the working-class’ interests defender. We could argue that, though not in a convetional way, the Irish party system also emerged from Rokkan’s economic cleavage. The economic cleavage together with the previously mentioned cleavage, the confrontation centre-periphery, shaped the party system and almost froze it from 1932 till the beginning of the 1970s. Fianna Fáil was the undefeated winner after every single election, followed without exception, by Fine Gael, which had their permanent partner, the Labour Party, who generally found itself in third position. There have been and there still are other political parties who have taken part in the Irish electoral market, but either they have disappeared after a short success (Clann na Poblachta, Clann na Talmhan) or they have remained as small parties (Democratic Left, Progressive Democrats).