Election

Yesterday and today I stuck to my knitting regarding my job search. Also lined up B&Bs for my mom’s visit in June.

Today was election day, when 18 people are elected to the Northern Ireland Assembly to represent 1.8 million people. Ulster residents are also represented by scores of council members at the local level, 18 members of parliament in London, and three European Parliament members. I think that’s a lot of salaries, pensions, staff costs, office rental, and miscellaneous expenses for 1.8 million people to carry, particularly when the percentage of those people in private employment is relatively small.

I’m writing this a week past the posted date so I can report that 1.28 million were registered to vote and voter turnout in the election--held every five years--was 55%.

The upshot of the election was more of the same. The Democratic Unionist Party retained its 38 seats, Sinn Fein held its 28 seats, the Ulster Unionist Party secured 16, the Social Democratic Labour Party took 12, Alliance 8, and a few seats each to smaller parties. This means that the DUP and Sinn Fein will govern in a shared ministry, carefully designed so that neither unionists (“we want to remain part of the United Kingdom”) nor nationalists (“we want to join the Republic of Ireland”) can ramrod through policies that offend the other side.

Northern Ireland has a consociationalist government. From wiki: "Political scientists define a consociational state as a state which has major internal divisions along ethnic, religious, or linguistic lines, with none of the divisions large enough to form a majority group, yet nonetheless manages to remain stable, due to consultation among the elites of each of its major social groups. Consociational states are often contrasted with states with majoritarian electoral systems.”

Majority rule in NI long meant the unionists discriminated against the (largely Catholic) nationalists. Consociationalism was meant to cure that. But all it has done is required two diametrically opposed parties to work together. How do two parties govern a state when they don’t agree on what the state is and therefore have different ideas about what is best for the state? Note the word elites above. In the grim world of realpolitik, I think NI is governed to suit the needs of each elite--the people be damned. My friend Ann’s son, Jack, wrote an award-winning essay on NI. An excerpt:
"The unionist and nationalist parties know that, due to power-sharing, there will always be unionists and nationalists in power. As the Assembly is not a traditional majoritarian parliament, there is no risk of either bloc not entering government. This results in complacency on the part of the unionist and nationalist parties. They do not need to reach out to voters in the other community, they do not need to build support across the electorate. They have no incentive to pursue and implement policies that will benefit the other community.”

And: “Power-sharing has not resolved the underlying causes of the conflict, and it has not succeeded in eliminating the sectarianism present in Northern Irish politics and society. If anything, it has only strengthened the sectarian divide.”
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