The 2011 general election in the Republic of Ireland, which took place against a backdrop of economic collapse, was one of the most dramatic ever witnessed. The most notable outcome was the collapse of Fianna Fáil, one of the world's most enduring and successful parties. In comparative terms Fianna Fáil's defeat was among the largest experienced by a major party in the history of parliamentary democracy. It went from being the largest party in the state (a position it had held since 1932) to being a bit player in Irish political life. And yet ultimately, there was much that remained the same, perhaps most distinctly of all the fact that no new parties emerged. It was, if anything, a 'conservative revolution'. A Conservative Revolution? examines underlying voter attitudes in the period 2002-11. Drawing on three national election studies the book follows party system evolution and voter behaviour from boom to bust. These data permits an unprecedented insight into a party system and its voters at a time of great change, as the country went through a period of rapid growth to become one of Europe's wealthiest states in the early twenty-first century to economic meltdown in the midst of the international Great Recession, all of this in the space of a single decade. In the process, this study explores many of the well-established norms and conventional wisdoms of Irish electoral behaviour that make it such an interesting case study for comparison with other industrialized democracies.

This book offers a timely, and fresh historical perspective on the politics of independent Ireland. Interwar Ireland’s politics have been caricatured as an anomaly, with the distinction between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael bewildering political commentators and scholars alike. It is common for Ireland’s politics to be presented as an anomaly that compare unfavourably to the neat left/right cleavages evident in Britain and much of Europe. By offering an historical re-appraisal of the Irish Free State’s politics, anchored in the wider context of inter-war Europe, Mel Farrell argues that the Irish party system is not unique in having two dominant parties capable of adapting to changing circumstances, and suggests that this has been a key strength of Irish democracy. Moreover, the book challenges the tired cliché of ‘Civil War Politics’ by demonstrating that events subsequent to Civil War led the Fine Gael/Fianna Fáil cleavage dominant in the twentieth-century.

“My attention was drawn to Ireland by footnotes,” writes the author. “Over and over again the literature of comparative politics noted simply ‘except in Ireland’.... The question that puzzled me was, Why should this be so?” Professor Carty’s answers to the question appear in this detailed study that sheds new light on the question of establishing democratic politics after a war of independence, on the impact of electoral laws on party competition, on the social bases of political competition, and on the way political machines work in modern democracies. As a case study the book also analyzes the peculiarly conservative syndrome into which Irish politics has fallen. Carty concludes that political institutions and the activities of politicians make a considerable difference to the organization and conduct of public life. The book will interest students of comparative politics, history, and political sociology, as well as those concerned with the shape and direction of society and politics in contemporary Ireland.