Section A2.1 in the appendix to the chapter describes in detail how local government is organised and operates in the Republic of Ireland. Briefly, while the Irish government is highly centralised, local government in Ireland is delegated responsibility from the central governments in relation to a variety of areas (e.g. housing, planning, recreation and amenities, fire services etc.). 949 councillors are directly elected by the Irish electorate to 137 municipal districts, each of which has to fill between four and ten seats. These districts go on to form 31 local authorities, 26 covering each of the counties of the Republic of Ireland and a further five covering the largest cities.
Local government in Ireland is notable for the extent to which it is subordinate to the national government (Chubb, 1992), in particular due to the fact that it is not financially independent and instead must depend on the central government for transfers (Davis, 2003; Weeks & Quinlivan, 2009). However, while the councils mainly act as agents of the central government whose goal is to deliver national policy (e.g. collecting motor tax, delivering Higher Education Authority grants) they do still have some discretion as to how they meet the goals laid out for them (Callanan, 2003).
Local elections must take place at least every five years. In prior years local elections were postponed to facilitate the agenda of the central government but this became impossible once local government became constitutionally recognised for the first time with the passage of the Twentieth Amendment to the Constitution of Ireland (1999) (Greene, 2003; Weeks & Quinlivan, 2009). Anyone who is resident for at least twelve months and is over 18 can vote in the local elections. The Local Government (Ireland) Act (1919) established the single-transferrable vote (STV) as the electoral system for the local elections, a system which is also used in the general elections. Chapter One offered a brief description of this electoral system with an example from the 2014 local elections showing how seats are allocated in practice (see Weeks and Quinlivan [2009, p.44-49] and Gallagher and Marsh [2016, p.308-310] for a more detailed discussion).
9 Chapter One has described the party system in Ireland in detail, so this chapter proceeds without revisiting this issue.
54 With respect to who can run for local office, there are some limitations; members of the police force (an Garda Siochana), the army, the civil service, and the other branches of government cannot run. Non-party candidates must present the signatures of fifteen electors in the local area or lodge a small deposit as part of their nomination process, while party candidates must provide a proof of party affiliation only. One interesting feature of local councils up until 2003 was the ability of representatives to exercise a dual mandate, that is, to be a TD and a local councillor at the same time. Defenders of the dual mandate argued that it facilitated communication between the local and national levels of government, though critics pointed out that it allowed national politicians to monitor potential rivals and to allow the centre to further dominate the local (Kenny, 2003; Weeks & Quinlivan, 2009).
Candidates running in local elections are subject to campaign spending limits between €7,500 and €15,000, depending on the population size of the electoral area, as set out under the Local Elections (Disclosure of Donations and Expenditure) Act (1999), the Electoral (Amendment) Act (2001), and subsequently modified in 2009. Despite these limits in reality candidates tend to spend much less than the maximum allowed: the typical spend across parties at the 2004 local elections was between €3,000 and a little over €4,000 (Weeks & Quinlivan, 2009), while the mean campaign expenditure in 2014 was €4095.84 (Local Election Candidate Survey, 2014). In terms of the type of campaign activities that are undertaken by candidates, Weeks’ and Quinlivan’s (2009) survey data on the 2004 local election campaign indicates that across all parties the activities that are most frequently undertaken by candidates are door-to-door canvassing, erecting posters, and speaking on radio.
Candidates may run on single issues (Weeks & Quinlivan, 2009) but it is notable that the 2009 local election campaign was fought over national rather than local issues (Quinlivan & Weeks, 2010). This pattern also emerged at the 2014 elections; asked in the 2014 Local Election Candidate Survey what were the primary issues that they were campaigning on, a majority of candidates identified national issues like water charges, property taxes, and healthcare. These elections are therefore often seen as a test of the popularity of national government and its policies (Weeks & Quinlivan, 2009; Loughlin, 2012), with the locals using them as an opportunity to give the government a mid-term shock (Quinlivan & Weeks, 2010). Though voting patterns at this level are similar to those at the national level, there are two important differences that it is worth remarking on; Fianna Fáil has tended to do worse in the local elections, while non-party candidates tend to do better than they do in general elections (Gallagher, 1989; Weeks & Quinlivan, 2009). All of this means that elections at this level can be described as second-order elections. In line with their second-order status, turnout for the local elections is consistently lower than at the general election (Barrington, 1991), though it is generally higher than it is in other countries for this level (Loughlin, 2012).
55 With respect to the type of people who run for office at this level, Weeks and Quinlivan (2009) describe them as more likely to be male, middle-aged, and educated than the electorate at large. This is not surprising since women’s representation among candidates has been low; they made up between 12 and 33 percent of candidates across parties at the 2004 local election (ibid.) and an overall average of 21.76 percent at the most recent election (2014 Local Election Candidate Survey). This latter figure is primarily due to parties informally trialling the legislative gender quota (described in Chapter One) that would come into effect at the 2016 general election; the local election gave parties the opportunity to encourage women who had not run before to gain electoral experience at this level before calling on them to run again in the general election where the stakes would be considerably higher due to the financial penalty levied on those parties that failed to comply.
Table 2.1. Candidates and councillors by gender and party at the 2014 local election
Party Total candidates fielded† Women fielded Total candidates elected* Women elected Fine Gael 466 (23.05%) 106 235 (24.76%) 51 Fianna Fáil 415 (20.52%) 75 267 (28.13%) 37 Labour Party 189 (9.35%) 53 51 (5.37%) 17 Sinn Féin 196 (9.69%) 61 159 (16.75%) 46 Green Party 47 (2.32%) 15 12 (1.26%) 3 Other party 136 (6.73%) 39 32 (3.37%) 11 Independents 573 (28.34%) 91 193 (20.34%) 31 Total 2022 (100%) 440 (21.76%) 949 (100%) 196 (20.65%)
†In brackets are percentages of total candidates fielded. *In brackets are percentages of total candidates elected.
We can see the impact of this decision to trial the gender quota at the most recent election. In 2004, women made up only 151 councillors out of a total of 1,627, or 9.28 percent. In 2009 this was reduced by 4 councillors to 147 or 9.04 percent. This share more than doubled in 2014, jumping to 20.65 percent. Table 2.1 below breaks down by party and gender the candidates running and subsequently elected at that election. It is worth remarking on the share of women fielded by each party. Sinn Féin and the Green Party both exceeded the thirty percent target that the gender quota, passed by
56 legislation in 2012, specified for the next general election. The Labour Party as well as the miscellaneous small parties nearly reached this level with 28.04 and 28.68 percent respectively. Fine Gael manages only 22.75 percent but what is remarkable are the figures for Fianna Fáil and the non- party candidates. Despite running 415 candidates in total – the second highest number of the political parties, after Fine Gael – Fianna Fáil’s female candidates made up only 18.07 percent of the total. For independents this was more than two points lower at 15.88 percent. This ranking is relatively consistent with the gender composition of the candidates across parties from the 2004 and 2009 local elections, along the differences between the parties is not so stark (see Table A2.2 in the appendix to this chapter). This is fairly consistent with prior research showing that smaller parties and parties of the left are typically more hospitable to women’s candidacies both in Ireland and elsewhere (Galligan, 1993; Caul, 1999; McGing, 2013).
As has been noted above, local political office in Ireland represents an important pipeline career for national office; in fact, local politics is a training ground for politicians. As Weeks and Quinlivan (2009, p.150) note “the vast majority of TDs were also county or city councillors. There is therefore no sense of clear distinction between politicians as councillors and parliamentarians. Most of the former aspire to a career as the latter, while most of the latter fear a rival emerging from the former.” Buckley et al. (2015, p.318) point out that this role of local councils as nurseries for future national politicians makes it particularly concerning that fewer women are elected to local councils because “[a]s a result it is men, not women, who are gaining the skills, credibility, and political resources that can be used in the pursuit of higher office.” The authors find that while all candidates at the 2007 and 2011 Irish general elections benefit from having local-level political experience, the impact was much bigger for women. Men with prior experience on a local council were 54 percent more likely to be elected than men without such experience. For women with this experience, they are 173 percent more likely to be elected than women who have never held local office.
It is important to examine what happens to women when they run for local office. As has been discussed above, if women encounter resistance to their candidacies at this level this should have two consequences. Firstly, it should deter them from running for national office in future and secondly it should deter other women who are qualified to run from doing so. We already know from prior research (Lawless & Fox, 2011) that women are more likely than men to doubt their qualifications for office and ability to engage in so-called ‘campaign mechanics’. If women who are best placed to run (party activists etc.) but have not done so receive information from those women who have about gendered differences in the campaign experience, this should confirm their worst fears about running for office. The result is therefore fewer women at all levels of government and fewer women who are inclined to put themselves forward.
57 The next section describes the dataset as well as the measurement of the variables.