Blog Posts
The 2024 Local and European Parliament Elections are approaching fast. The obvious question is whether current polls about support for General Elections can predict the outcomes of these two “second-order” elections in less than a month. After summarising the current levels of party support, I compare Polling Indicator estimates to the results of General Elections as well as to the 2019 Local and European Parliament Elections. While the “poll of polls” at the end of a legislative cycle correspond fairly closely to results of General Elections between 1989 and 2020, the correlation with the outcomes of the 2019 Local and European Parliament elections is much lower. We should therefore be cautious about using current polls to predict the results of the upcoming Local and European Parliament Elections.
The past six months have changed the political discourse in Ireland. We have observed several crucial developments since the last blog post published in July 2023. But let’s go through this step by step. First, we inspect current levels of aggregated party support, before moving to developments over the past months. Finally, we present how issue priorities have changed since the summer of 2023.
