Having looked at the overall trends for Independents, a more in-depth examination of Independent candidates is required. The aim of the following sections is to first isolate, then assess and analyse, the different types of Independents, which will provide a framework to establish the electoral appeal of Independents in later chapters. This is necessary, because Independents cannot be researched without appreciating the diversity of the candidates. It is a difficult task because Independents are quite a heterogeneous grouping, within which there is as much diversity as occurs between the parties, a diversity that motivated Busteed to state that ‘Independents are by definition almost impossible to categorise’ (1990: 40), Coakley to claim that ‘classifying deputies as independents is not always easy’ (2003: 515), and Cooney to assert that Independents are ‘unclassifiable representatives of Irish individualism’ (1981). As a result, it is impossible to achieve universal agreement for a categorisation of approximately 1,000 candidates. However, the traits
26
Dependent is defined here as when a proposed government needs the votes of Independent TD(s) to win the vote of investiture in the Dáil.
associated with each category are defined, and a justification for the inclusion of the various types of Independents is also provided. The aim is to provide something as close as possible to what can be described as an objective analysis. While it is accepted that not everyone will agree with the chosen categorisation of some Independents, a perfect categorisation is not possible; nevertheless, the methodology was employed in a consistent manner. The four different types of Independents included in this study were already noted in chapter 1: pure Independents, interest group Independents, gene pool Independents, and representative of micro-parties. The aim of this section is to build on this categorisation to identify more specific types of Independent candidates. The format of much of the rest of the chapter replicates that of Coakley’s study of minor parties (1990). Since the aim of his research was to provide some ‘thick-descriptive’ analysis on an under-researched minor political actor, it is a useful framework to adopt for a similar study of another type of minor political actor: Independents.
Independents can be categorised on several levels: electoral, organisational, and ideological; this chapter examines just the ideological, but on three sub-levels. The ideal method to typologise Independents would be to survey them all, and based on their responses, divide them into specific categories. This method was used for a survey of Independent candidates at the 2004 local elections (see chapters 1 and 5), but it would be impossible to undertake this method for all 29 general elections for reasons of cost, time and other practical factors, the most obvious of which is that most of the candidates from the 1950s and earlier have unfortunately passed away. Another method could be to analyse survey data of voters to identify if Independent candidates appealed to a specific type of voter, but this is not feasible because prior to 2007 there was only one election study to date carried out in Ireland.
Given the lack of survey data, I chose to analyse the nature of Independents’ campaigns by perusing contemporary newspapers from the time of the various general elections. Irish newspapers provide a particularly rich dataset of information on candidates’ campaigns, as they describe the campaigns, report on candidates’ speeches from political rallies, and often list
personal particulars about the nature of the candidate, examples being their occupation or political ideology. The main source used was The Irish Times,
and where information was lacking on Independent candidates in that newspaper, The Irish Press and Irish Independent were consulted. While including local newspapers would have also facilitated this research, this would have involved reading the many provincial papers for each of the twenty-nine elections; for reasons of time, this was not an option. The method of research applied was to read and analyse the newspapers for two months before the day of election and for one month after. Applied to 29 elections this amounted to a reading of 87 months of newspapers – over seven years’ worth of coverage. Every piece of information on Independents was recorded, and was combined with additional information on Independents gleaned from the secondary literature and parliamentary debates. Having compiled a mass of information, the data were analysed to identify various categories of Independents. This was not done blindly, since I was already aware of various categories of Independents, largely gained from personal observation of the Irish political scene.
Despite the lack of research to date on Independents, there have been a number of attempts to categorise the different types of Independents. In the solitary study to date solely on Independents in Ireland, Chubb identified four categories of Independents: Independent Farmers, Business candidates, party dissidents, and ‘political oddities’, which was largely a residual category (1957: 134–5). Gallagher described seven types of Independents: Independent Business, ex-Unionists, one-person crusades, ‘friends of the worker’, Independents with affinities to a major party, party dissidents, and ‘friends and neighbours’ Independents, who attract a vote based on their record of constituency service (1985: 119). In the 1990s, Sinnott identified the emergence of another category, that of left-wing ideological Independents (1995: 65), along with two additional types for European Parliament elections: ‘interest group’ independents and ‘political tendency’ independents (Sinnott 1995: 260). Coakley classified four types of Independents: remnants of the old Unionist and Nationalist parties, party dissidents, those defending particular
interests, and a catch-all category that mainly includes locally-minded Independents (2003: 515). Finally, FitzGerald said in the 1980s and 1990s a new type of Independent candidate emerged, one focussed on local issues, who is ‘locally-focused rather than issue-focused’ (FitzGerald 2003: 63).
Because Independents do not have a party label per se, they often adopt a descriptive label or else are christened with one by the media; this usually reflects the nature of the candidates’ ideological appeal. Examples include Independent Farmers, who stand on an agricultural platform and naturally appeal to the farming vote, and Independent Unionists who stood on a Unionist platform. Categorising these Independents is relatively straightforward as it simply involves examining the contemporary press to determine what label they stood under. However, not all Independent candidates have such a clear descriptive title, with many of them just labelled non-party candidates. To categorise these candidates a ‘thick-descriptive’ analysis of their campaigns and their candidacies was necessary, which sometimes proved difficult, because Independents are not allotted as much coverage in the media as party candidates.
After scanning the newspapers since 1922, six clear categories of Independents based on their ideological appeal were identified. These are: remnants of former parties, corporatist Independents, ideological Independents, community Independents, temperamental Independents, and micro-parties. Within each of these, a further level of seven sub-categories of Independents can be identified, details of which are provided in table 3.3 below. The remnants of former parties category includes both Independent Unionists and Independent Nationalists; corporatist Independents includes Independent Farmers and Independent Business candidates; and ideological Independents consists of left-wing Independents, Independent Republicans, and single-issue Independents. To aid replication, these Independent categories were identified as follows:
Independent Unionists: this includes only those who identified themselves as such during the campaign.
Independent Nationalists: this includes only those who had previously run for the Irish Parliamentary Party.
Independent Farmers: this includes all those who identified themselves as such during the campaign, or were nominated by a particular farming association. Independent Business: this includes all those who identified themselves as such during the campaign, or were standing on behalf of a group promoting business interests.
Left-wing Independents: this includes all those who had previously been members of left-wing parties and are no longer classified as Temperamental Independents, those who ran on behalf of a left-wing movement, those who ran on an ‘Independent Labour’ ticket (but not including those who had run for Labour at a preceding election), and those who ran on an openly socialist ticket. Independent Republicans: this includes all those who identified themselves as such during the campaign.
Single-issue Independents: this includes all those who stressed in their campaign the promotion of one single issue.
Community Independents: this includes all those who identified themselves as such, those who campaigned on issues solely of interest to the local constituency (and did not fall under any other category of Independent), and the residuals, for whom no information on their campaign was available.
Temperamental Independents: this includes all those who had run as a party candidate at a preceding election, and all those who had a history of association with a party.
Micro-parties: this includes all Independents running under a quasi-party label, where the respective ‘party’ failed to acquire official status.
Table 3.3. Typology of Independents, 1922–2002 1. Remnants of former parties
Independent Unionists Independent Nationalists 2. Corporatist Independents Independent Farmers Independent Business 3. Ideological Independents Left-wing Independents Independent Republicans Single-issue Independents 4. Community Independents 5. Temperamental Independents 6. Micro-parties
These categories may not be ideological all of the time, with temperamental Independents and micro-parties the main two examples of deviation. The former includes politicians who became Independents after falling out with a party. Their motivations could be ideological, but very often this category includes aggrieved individuals who failed to gain a party nomination to run for election, or who were expelled from the party for one reason or another. These Independents sometimes flit between parties, which explains their title.27
The category of micro-parties includes personal vehicle movements, who may be ideological, but sometimes the party label is adopted just to provide added legitimacy to an individual’s candidacy. Adapting these categories to the aforementioned four types of Independents referred to within the framework of this dissertation, both the remnants of former parties and temperamental Independents are gene pool Independents, corporatist Independents and ideological Independents are the representatives of interest groups, micro-parties is self-explanatory, while community Independents fall under the description of ‘pure’ Independents.
27
Party dissidents were christened with this label by Nicolson in the context of the UK (quoted in Bulmer-Thomas 1953: 269).
The following sections analyse each of the different families of Independents separately. It describes who these candidates were and the nature and strength of support they received, both as a distinct group and in relation to the national level of support for Independents.