Irish general election: proportion of candidates elected.

I like numbers, and I like politics, and there were some very interesting numbers and fascinating politics produced by the Irish general election on Saturday 8th February. The politics can be interpreted in many ways – the policies, the politicians, the scandals, the marketing, the money - and are discussed, it can seem infinitely, by the political aficionados that comprise most of the Irish public, never mind the media. The numbers are finite and much less arguable, but as the numbers in this election have meant that we still don’t have a government three weeks after the election, I think it’s worth looking at some of those figures in more detail. You would think that every permutation and combination of these digits would by now have been scrutinised and analysed. Yet there are some important aspects of these numbers that I have seen very little analysis of and which seem important to both the formation of any government and to what might happen if a government is not formed and another election is called in the near future. So here are some observations, with more to follow in another post.

There has been a good deal of attention given to two types of numbers after this election – the number of seats each party and independents got, and the percentage of first preferences the parties got. I’m going to look at seat numbers in this post, and address first preferences in a later one. First of it’s worth remembering that there are 160 seats in this Dáil, the 33rd Dáil. That is not the same number as the last Dáil, which had only 158 seats after the 2016 election, or the one before that in 2011, which had 166 seats, a number which was changed by law in 2013. When all the counting had been completed by one minute to midnight on Monday 10th February, Fianna Fáil had emerged with 38 seats, Sinn Féin had 37 seats, Fine Gael 35, the Green Party 12, the Labour Party 6, the Social Democrats 6, Solidarity-People Before Profit 5, and Independents and Others had 21 seats between them (including 1 for Aontú and 1 for Independents for Change). So let’s look at these in more detail.

One point to recall is that Fianna á actually won 37 seats but came out with 38 because a Fianna Fáil TD, Seán Ó Fearghaíl, was Ceann Comhairle, the Speaker, in the last Dáil, and thus was automatically returned in this election without having to contest his seat. So Fianna Fáil only actually ‘won’ the same number of seats, 37, as Sinn Féin, and Ó Fearghaíl was not one of the FF candidates in the election. O Fearghail has been made Ceann Comhairle again for this Dáil, having beaten Denis Naughten in the competition in the only real piece of Dáil business to have been conducted so far, on the first day the new Dáil sat, as electing a new Ceann Comhairle is the first thing a new Dáil has to do. Now that O Fearghail is Ceann Comhairle again, it is even more the case that FF have 37 seats, as the Ceann Comhairle cannot generally vote in the Dáil, though they can cast a deciding vote in the case of a tie. So those are the real seat numbers, and the big conundrum facing the parties, and why they are still arguing and are probably weeks if not months away from forming a government, is that it is very difficult to combine any of these bundles of seats held by the parties and independents into a coalition that numbers more than 80 seats, which would be a majority in the Dáil.

A key point worth exploring in more depth concerns the numbers of seats won by parties compared to the number of candidates each party ran. I’ve seen this mentioned in passing in articles, usually focussed on Sinn Féin, but here I’ll look at all the parties. There are 39 constituencies. The parties ran very different numbers of candidates and had very different success rates in terms of the proportion of their candidates they got elected. Fianna Fáil ran the largest number of candidates, 84, with usually two and sometimes three candidates in each of the 39 constituencies. Fine Gael ran 82 candidates, again in all constituencies. The Green Party ran 39, one candidate in each constituency. None of the other parties ran candidates in every constituency. Sinn Féin put forward a total of 42 candidates in 38 constituencies. Solidarity-People Before Profit ran 37 candidates in 32 constituencies and the Labour Party ran 31 candidates in 31 constituencies, while the Social Democrats ran 20 candidates in 20 constituencies.

A total of 37 of Sinn Féin’s 42 candidates were elected, meaning that Sinn Féin managed to get an impressive 88% (88.09%) of its candidates elected. In contrast, 37 of 84 FF candidates were elected, a success rate of 44% (44.04%), exactly half of Sinn Féin. Meanwhile 35 of 82 Fine Gael candidates were successful, just under 43% (42.68%). So while each of these three ‘big’ parties has the same or close to the same numbers of seats, their efficacy in getting their candidates elected was wildly different. Coming down to a very close count in Wicklow, ultimately 12 of the 39 Green candidates were elected, so 30.77% success, while the 6 seats won by Social Democrats gives a very similar success rate across their 20 candidates of 30%. The 6 seats won by the Labour Party, in contrast, represented only a 19.35% success out of their 31 candidates. Solidarity-People Before Profit, with their 5 seats being only 1 seat less than Labour and the Social Democrat’s totals, did considerably worse in terms of their percentage success, with only 13.51% of their 37 candidates getting elected. These different percentages are significant in terms of giving a different perspective on the popularity and success of the parties, and in terms of strategy about how many candidates they could have gotten elected in the last election, given different overall numbers run, and how many they might get elected in a future election.

There has been much discussion of the fact that Sinn Féin could have gotten more seats if it had run more candidates, which certainly seems true based on its overall success, on the extremely high proportion of its candidates who were successful, on the percentage of first preference votes it got, and on the fact that it got two people elected in all four constituencies where it ran two candidates. However, it is also the case that some of the other parties would probably have done better if they had run fewer candidates, especially for Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, and this is something that hasn’t been mentioned as much. If Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil had not run two and even three candidates in some constituencies, they would probably have emerged with at least a similar number of seats, and possibly more, as they would not have split their vote so much.

In a future post I’ll provide some additional observations concerning candidates run versus candidates successful, and I’ll look at first preferences in much more detail.

It’s leap day, 29th February, so it seemed an appropriate day to get stuck into some numbers. Meanwhile, the first case of coronavirus has just been confirmed today in Ireland, and while this novel disease is receiving more attention than greater health concerns, homelessness or education, hopefully in all the attention and resources being given to government formation, these much more important issues will still get addressed, and urgently.