The Irish Polling Indicator, a project launched in 2014 and maintained by Stefan Müller, combines all Irish opinion polls for the Dáil Éireann into ranges of likely support. The Polling Indicator focuses on contextualising new polls, not on competing with pollsters or making election predictions.

Estimates from the Irish Polling Indicator were reported in RTÉ News, The Guardian, Reuters, the Financial Times, The Irish Times, the Irish Independent, The Sunday Times, and the Business Post.

Scroll down for the latest estimates, interactive graphs, a description of the method, access to the raw data, and blog posts. You can follow the Irish Polling Indicator on BlueSky.

The graph below compares first-preference vote shares in the 2024 General Election with the Irish Polling Indicator estimates released the day before the election. On average, the election results deviated by less than 0.6 percentage points from the Polling Indicator estimate. With the exception of the Green Party and Solidarity-PBP, the Irish Polling Indicator estimates were within the margin of error.

General Election 2024

Comparing Vote-Poll Errors Since 1989

To assess the accuracy of polls more systematically, we can calculate the vote-poll error. If the election result matches the polls exactly, the vote-poll error is zero. For example, a vote-poll error of 1 would mean that, on average, the polls were off by one percentage point from the election results across all parties and Independents. The figure below shows polling errors for Irish general elections from 1989 to 2024. Across these nine elections, the estimates were off by 1.23 percentage points from actual first-preference vote shares. This vote-poll error is considerably better than the errors observed in a comparative study of over 30,000 opinion polls from 350 elections in 45 countries.
With a vote-poll error of 0.54 in the 2024 General Election, the Irish Polling Indicator has never been more accurate.

Note: The Irish Polling Indicator only includes parties consistently tracked by all pollsters. As a result, parties mentioned by only some polling companies are placed in the “Independents/Others” category.

The basic idea of the Irish Polling Indicator, launched in 2014, is to take all available polling information together to arrive at the best estimate of current support for parties. Polls are great tools for measuring public opinion, but because only a limited sample is surveyed, we need to take into account sampling error. By combining multiple polls, we can reduce this error.

Moreover, with so many polls going around it is difficult to get a random sample of voters to participate in any one public opinion survey. And those that do participate might not have a clear idea who to vote for, something that is often adjusted for in polls. This may lead to structural differences between the results of different polling companies, so-called house effects.

The Irish Polling Indicator considers sampling error and house effects when aggregating support for Irish parties.

Read more about the method and technical details

Irish Polling Indicator

We provide full access to all available polling results (1982–2024) and daily aggregated estimates (1987–2024). We provide the daily estimates and raw polling results in four file formats. A detailed codebook describes both datasets and all variables.

Development Version (Latest Data Release)

First, we release our datasets as a development version which is updated after the release of every poll and stored in a GitHub repository.

• Irish Polling Indicator estimates:

  • csv
  • Stata (dta)
  • R (rds)

• Raw polling results:

  • csv
  • Excel (xlsx)
  • Stata (dta)
  • R (rds)

If you use the development version of the data in your work, please consider citing:

Tom Louwerse and Stefan Müller. 2024. Irish Polling Indicator Datasets: Development Version. URL: https://github.com/Irish-Polling-Indicator/ipi-data.

Stable Version

Second, we provide a stable version of the daily estimates and raw polling results. New releases are published after an election cycle. The stable version has a unique identifier (DOI: 10.7910/DVN/BY5GXC).

If you use the stable version in your work, please consider citing:

Tom Louwerse and Stefan Müller. 2022. Irish Polling Indicator Datasets: Stable Version. Harvard Dataverse, V1. DOI: 10.7910/DVN/BY5GXC

Irish Demographic Polling Datasets

In addition to the Irish Polling Indicator data, the Irish Demographic Polling Datasets collect results on vote intentions, satisfaction with the government, and popularity of party leaders. The polling results are available for all respondents and various subsamples, such as age groups, gender, social class, geographic region, and district magnitude. The database merges over 100 polls, published between 2011 and 2024. The datasets can be accessed, visualised, and downloaded through an interactive dashboard.

• Government satisfaction (all respondents and subsamples): csv, Stata (dta), R (rds)
• Satisfaction with party leaders (all respondents and subsamples): csv, Stata (dta), R (rds)
• Vote intentions (all respondents and subsamples):
  • RedC polls: csv, Stata (dta), R (rds)
  • Behaviour and Attitudes polls: csv, Stata (dta), R (rds)

All datasets and variables are described in a detailed report and codebook (PDF).

If you use the stable version in your work, please consider citing:

Stefan Müller, Thomas Pluck, and Paula Montano .2024. Irish Demographic Polling Datasets. URL: https://github.com/Irish-Dem-Polling/datasets

Irish Politics Data

The Irish Politics Data project collects links to datasets, text corpora, and dashboards on Irish politics. The website features polling results, national and cross-national surveys, election results, legislative data, party manifestos, parliamentary speeches, policy agendas, annual reports, and relevant literature from both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. The project aims to guide researchers, policymakers, journalists, and citizens to data and empirical literature on politics on the island of Irelan

• Maintainers: Stefan Müller and Michele Crepaz
• Research Assistants: Robin Rauner and Eoghan Kelly

Project Leader and Maintainer

Stefan Müller is an Associate Professor in the School of Politics and International Relations at University College Dublin. Stefan’s research focuses on political representation, party competition, political communication, public opinion, and quantitative text analysis.
Website | CV | BlueSky

Founding Member

Tom Louwerse is an Associate Professor in Political Science at Leiden University, the Netherlands. Tom’s research and teaching focuses on elections, political representation and parliamentary politics in the Netherlands and other established democracies.
Website | BlueSky

Research Assistant

Paula Montano Website | BlueSky

Supporters and Partners

The Irish Polling Indicator is hosted at the Institute of Political Science at Leiden University and the Connected_Politics Lab at University College Dublin. The project received financial support from the 2021 Strategic Funding Scheme of the UCD College of Social Sciences and Law.