Candidate Responsiveness to Constituency Opinion in Ireland

Ireland has arguably the most candidate-centred electoral system of any national parliament, which creates clear incentives for candidates to respond to constituency interests. To date, however, the responsiveness of candidates to their constituents has only been studied in terms of service provision or ‘pork-barrel’ allocation. In contrast, this paper examines candidates’ policy responsiveness – i.e. the degree to which election candidates tailor their policy positions to reflect local opinion. I develop a measure of constituency ideology using a combination of survey data and information on the demographic profile of constituencies drawn from the 2016 census. Candidate positions, meanwhile, are measured based on their declared positions on a public website during the 2016 election campaign. The findings show that only independent candidates respond to local preference in terms of their policy positioning; however, party candidates do respond to local preferences in terms of the issues they choose to prioritise.