This was the election in which Sinn Féin – smarting from poor mid-term electoral trends – was targeting steady state, or at best slight gains, but nothing too dramatic. This was the election in which Fianna Fáil (buoyed in particular by early campaign opinion poll bumps) expected to continue its path to renewal almost a decade after its 2011 electoral meltdown. This was the election in which Fine Gael expected to be rewarded for its stewardship of the economy, having taken the economy out of recession and supposedly into another period of prosperity. In these times of electoral change it is commonplace to talk of the outcome of an election as being like no other, and certainly the 2020 Irish election did not disappoint in that regard. The note concludes with a brief review of the papers that follow in the rest of this special issue. right divide in electoral politics in which strongly held ideological positions trump parochial, candidate-centred concerns. We apply this technique to the 2020 data set, which indicates several interesting trends, among them: an emerging left vs. We then present the logic of the machine learning approach being adopted here, which works on the basis of using a host of independent variables to predict outcomes. We start by briefly setting the context of the extraordinary election outcome in 2020. Rather than adopting a theory-testing approach, we use a more data-driven strategy, identifying the key variables in the data set that are of relevance to understanding vote choice in 2020. We carry out an empirical analysis of vote choice in this election, examining what it is that differentiates voters for each of the main political parties. This research note makes a first foray into the UCD/Ireland Thinks data set (the INES 1), setting the scene for the papers that follow in this special issue by providing a general overview of the main drivers of the vote in 2020. These sources together provide a wealth of information on voter behaviour and media coverage in the 2020 Dáil election. 2 At the same time, researchers at the University of Limerick developed a voter advice application online, which enabled them to collect significant data on respondents’ political attitudes, and colleagues at Dublin City University collected information on media and social media during the campaign leading up to the election. University College Dublin in cooperation with Ireland Thinks carried out an online poll on the day of the election. The 2020 INES, the focus of this Special Issue, 1 comprises several discrete elements. ![]() In Ireland, the Irish political science community has organised the Irish National Election Study (INES) since 2002, but it has struggled to attract sufficient public funding to maintain consistency over the years, resulting in the political science departments arranging their own funding to ensure the series continues. The British Election Survey, the American National Election Survey, or the German Election Data Project are some of the more well-known examples. ![]() ![]() In contemporary democracies there is a long-standing tradition of a large, national election survey at the time of, or shortly after, a parliamentary election.
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