3000 words on the DUP, UUP, the ‘pluralism paradox’, why candidate quality is overrated, the cautionary tale of the PBP, STV and tallies. Back to the Future for the DUP On the 16th of June 2016, the Northern Ireland football team defeated Ukraine 2-0 at the Euros. Just six weeks before that game in Lyon, the Assembly election had delivered the third of three almost identical results since the return of powersharing in 2007: DUP 10 seats ahead of SF, followed by the UUP and SDLP a further dozen or so back, followed by the ‘others’ (who at this stage were still largely a footnote in proceedings). Unionists with a small majority, Executive formed, rinse and repeat. Given the electoral convulsions of the years immediately following the Good Friday Agreement, the stasis which Northern Ireland’s politics entered into in the decade after St Andrews almost suggests a society which had become relatively at ease with itself. The demographic change long promised to carry the province to a United Ireland was not translating into gains for Nationalist parties, who were in fact by 2016 starting to slide backwards. The radical anti-Agreement shifts Unionism from 1998-2003 had not spelled the end of devolution and had been tamed by the broad church electoral coalition constructed under the DUP. As President Obama himself
Some Observations on the NI Assembly Election
Some Observations on the NI Assembly Election
Some Observations on the NI Assembly Election
3000 words on the DUP, UUP, the ‘pluralism paradox’, why candidate quality is overrated, the cautionary tale of the PBP, STV and tallies. Back to the Future for the DUP On the 16th of June 2016, the Northern Ireland football team defeated Ukraine 2-0 at the Euros. Just six weeks before that game in Lyon, the Assembly election had delivered the third of three almost identical results since the return of powersharing in 2007: DUP 10 seats ahead of SF, followed by the UUP and SDLP a further dozen or so back, followed by the ‘others’ (who at this stage were still largely a footnote in proceedings). Unionists with a small majority, Executive formed, rinse and repeat. Given the electoral convulsions of the years immediately following the Good Friday Agreement, the stasis which Northern Ireland’s politics entered into in the decade after St Andrews almost suggests a society which had become relatively at ease with itself. The demographic change long promised to carry the province to a United Ireland was not translating into gains for Nationalist parties, who were in fact by 2016 starting to slide backwards. The radical anti-Agreement shifts Unionism from 1998-2003 had not spelled the end of devolution and had been tamed by the broad church electoral coalition constructed under the DUP. As President Obama himself