Hot to Trot: explaining radical left electoral success in Ireland

Scholars have attempted to explain the lack of left-led government in Ireland but this focus on left-wing failure has meant that the unusual electoral success of radical left parties has largely gone unexplained. Since 2011, the two largest Trotskyist parties in Ireland, the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) and the Socialist Party (SP), have been the most electorally successful Trotskyist movement in the Global North, through their electoral alliance known as People Before Profit / Solidarity (PBP-S). This is surprising as Irish voters tend to avoid ideological radicalism and most international Trotskyist parties view electioneering as a strategic dead end. There is an assumption that the ease of access for new entrants provided by the Irish electoral system sufficiently explains the ability of outsiders to gain Dáil representation. But, to what extent does Proportional Representation-Single Transferable Vote (PR-STV) explain radical left success in Irish elections? This article theorises that PR-STV does provide the structural opportunity for radical left electoral success. But it is the conservativism of Irish social democratic institutions, combined with the renewed saliency of typical class cleavages in Irish politics, that increases the likelihood of radical left representation. This article draws on qualitative interviews as well as data from the Irish Policy Agendas Project and the Public Policy Agendas on a Shared Island project which have coded party manifestos (North and South) based on the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) coding scheme. It compares PBP-S to other Irish parties (specifically its main competitor, Sinn Féin) and their radical left counterparts in Europe (e.g., La France Insoumise and Die Linke). The article finds that inter-left competition within a fragmented radical left space encourages PBP-S to embrace office-seeking electoral strategies and, furthermore, its position on the left flank of Sinn Féin restrains that party from further moves to the political centre.