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Nomination Strategies in the Irish STV System: The Dail Elections of 1969, 1973 and 1977

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Arend Lijphart  and
Galen A. Irwin
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Extract

In an innovative and carefully argued article (‘The Used Vote and Electoral Outcomes: The Irish General Election of 1973’, this Journal, V (1975), 363–83) on the Irish Single Transferable Vote (STV) system in the 1969 and 1973 Dail elections, A. S. Cohan, R. D. McKinlay and Anthony Mughan state a proposition that requires further analysis. They argue that ‘the optimal number of candidates for a party is equal to the largest number of seats that the party might hope to win’ in a constituency, instead of the more common practice of nominating a larger number of candidates. The reasoning behind this proposition is that the nomination of fewer candidates means a greater concentration of the party's vote on these candidates and hence fewer vote transfers and less potential wastage of votes.

Type
Notes and Comments
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , July 1979 , pp. 362 - 369
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1979

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References

1 Cohan, , McKinlay, and Mughan, , ‘The Used Vote and Electoral Outcomes’, p. 369 (italics added).Google Scholar

2 Hermens, F. A., Democracy or Anarchy? A Study of Proportional Representation (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1941), pp. 44–7.Google Scholar

3 Cohan, , McKinlay, and Mughan, , ‘The Used Vote and Electoral Outcomes’, p. 370.Google Scholar

4 Cohan, , McKinlay, and Mughan, , ‘The Used Vote and Electoral Outcomes’, p. 370.Google Scholar

5 The election data that we used were taken from Knight, James and Baxter-Moore, Nicolas, Republic of Ireland: The General Elections of 1969 and 1973 (London: The Arthur McDougall Fund, 1973)Google Scholar, and from the official government publication Election Results and Transfer of Votes in General Election (June, 1977) for Twenty-First Dail and Bye-Elections to Twentieth Dail (1973–1977) (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1978).Google Scholar

6 It may be argued that this is too severe a criterion; if, for instance, a party's first preference votes divided by the quota should be 1·40, the party does not run grave risks by nominating two candidates. But because it is difficult to decide where a more lenient threshold should be fixed – whether it should be 1·25, 1·30, or 1·35 in the above example – it seems to us preferable to use 1·50, 2·50, 3·50, etc., times the quota as the cutting-off point. It should be pointed out, however, that according to our definition a party does not overnominate if it has one candidate who receives fewer votes than 0·50 times the quota; the chances of getting a candidate elected are obviously not improved by not nominating anyone at all!

7 These two constituencies are North-East Donegal in 1969 and Sligo-Leitrim in 1977. However, if the Fine Gael-Labour coalition is treated as a single party, as later in this paper, the latter case must be excluded. Thus only a single case of no overnomination would remain.

8 The constituencies are North Kerry, (1973)Google Scholar, Monaghan, (1973)Google Scholar, and East Limerick, (1977).Google Scholar

9 Chubb, Basil, The Government and Politics of Ireland (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1971), p. 157.Google Scholar