The Future of Citizenship

A discussion of what constitutes identity and citizenship is timely and welcome. The linkage of citizenship to history and the association of citizenship with rights and responsibilities are appropriate. Nonetheless, we have concerns with some aspects of the discussion on citizenship

Another Communal Headcount: The Election in Northern Ireland

The Westminster election in Northern Ireland attracted more interest beyond the region than is normally the case. This was not because of healthy new attention being paid to the polity's regular communal (to critics, sectarian) bloc headcount. Rather, it was because the contest's outcome might influence the formation of a minority government at Westminster. This possibility was actively discussed even into election night results programmes, after the exit poll predicted the Conservatives to fall just short of an overall majority, with 316 seats. As that seat tally rose, Northern Ireland's election slid back to its default positions of obscurity and parochial communalism. Religious community background remained easily the most important voting determinant. Unionist electoral pacts in four constituencies heightened the prevailing sense of a traditional Orange versus Green contest, one in which the Alliance Party, aligned to neither bloc, lost its solitary representative. Turnout was a very modest 58%, well below the UK average. Only Sinn Fein, the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) and Alliance contested all 18 constituencies. Nonetheless, the contest was not entirely bereft of interest. There were significant arguments over a disparate array of topics ranging from welfare reform to that of same-sex marriage, still banned in Northern Ireland. Four seats changed hands and the once-dominant Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) recovered some recent lost ground to regain Westminster representation

Shared Identity and the End of Conflict? How Far Has a Common Sense of 'Northern Irishness' Replaced British or Irish Allegiances since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement?

Despite political progress in Northern Ireland, the polity may arguably only fully stabilise when its population regards themselves as ‘Northern Irish’ rather than merely as subsets of British and Irish parent nations. Power-sharing and relative peace since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement may have offered the possibility of the development of a common Northern Irish identity, to allow consolidation of a political entity challenged by sections of the nationalist minority since its formation in 1921. Alternatively, the consociational nature of the Agreement may have legitimised ‘separate but equal’ identity politics constructed on the British versus Irish faultline. This articles tests whether there has been a significant growth of cross-community Northern Irishness since the Agreement, capable of eroding inter-communal rivalry

How new party members are modernising the DUP

The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in Northern Ireland has undergone significant transformation since Northern Ireland’s ‘peace deal’, the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. Much of this transformation has been brought about by a sizeable influx of new members. The impact of new members is a surprisingly under-researched area. Here, Raul Gomez and Jonathan Tonge draw upon a recent membership study to examine how new arrivals contributed to altered attitudes from the DUP

Ed Miliband should recognise that 16 and 17 year olds can be part of our democracy even if they do not have the vote

Ed Miliband has recently backed a call from Democratic Audit and a range of youth organisations to lower the voting age in the UK to 16. In this post, the latest in our series on youth participation in democracy, Andy Mycock and Jonathan Tonge make the point that votes at 16 will not be a panacea to the problem of youth disengagement, and suggest we need wider reform of a political system that has become increasingly insular, self-selecting, and unrepresentative

“Faith, Crown and State”: Contemporary Discourses within the Orange Order in Northern Ireland

Despite a decline in membership in recent decades the Orange Order remains one of the largest and most significant organisations within civil society in Northern Ireland, representing a significant proportion of the Protestant population. The Orange Order claims a moral and political rationale to opposition to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and many of the political consequences that have followed. Drawing upon a large membership survey of the Orange institution (the first such survey ever undertaken), and abetted by in-depth semi-structured interviews, this paper examines core political and social attitudes of Orange Order members in a post-conflict environment. It identifies core discourses on offer within Orangeism, and how these structure responses to contemporary events. It concludes that the maintenance of “traditional” discourses within the Orange Order (seen by its critics as a barrier to the modernisation of unionism) may be key to its endurance against the odds in a changing political context and increasingly secularized world