Substantial Upgrades and Extensions

30 Mar 2022

The Irish Polling Indicator website comes in a new look, and we have released new publicly available datasets of all polls and estimates since the 1980s. This blog post describes the new features and data before we summarise recent developments in terms of support for Irish parties.

New Website

We are delighted to present the new website. The website has a responsive layout, a more intuitive structure, is better suited for mobile devices and contains the following features:

Feel free to explore the website and contact us if you have improvement suggestions. We also set up a Twitter account.

Full Data Access

We provide new datasets with all available raw polling results since 1982 and daily Irish Polling Indicator estimates from 1987 to 2022. The current version contains 642 polls and estimates for over 12,000 days. All datasets are available as csv, xlsx, dta, and rds files.

You are more than welcome to report our estimates in news articles or use the data in your academic papers. We would be grateful if you cite the project.

We release two versions of the data. The development version of our data is updated after the release of every poll. A new stable version will appear after an election cycle. A detailed codebook describes the datasets and variables.

Party Support

We now turn to a summary of changes and continuity in party support. The nine polls released in 2022 show relatively consistent patterns. Changes in support for most parties lie within the margin of error.

However, we still observe three trends. First, Sinn Féin remains the strongest party in Ireland, with support ranging between 31.5 and 35.5 per cent. The raw polling data show that the party has polled above 30 per cent in every poll since October 2021.

Second, Fine Gael has seen a continuous decline in support since the summer of 2020. The latest Red C poll reported a new low for Fine Gael. For the first time in a Red C poll, the party is below 20 per cent. The Polling Indicator estimates are in line with these numbers. On aggregate, the party polls at 17–21.5 per cent. Third, Fianna Fáil somewhat “recovered” (18–22 per cent) and is now on par with Fine Gael.

The Irish Polling Indicator estimates suggest that support for the Green Party (4–6 per cent), Labour (3–5), the Social Democrats (2.5–4.5), and Solidarity-PBP (2–3.5) has been stable since the beginning of the year. Based on our estimates, we do not observe an “Ivana Bacik boost” related to the leadership change in the Labour Party.

Funding and Team Members

The Irish Polling Indicator is hosted at the Institute of Political Science at Leiden University and the Connected_Politics Lab at University College Dublin. We received financial support from the 2021 Strategic Funding Scheme of the UCD College of Social Sciences and Law to redesign the website and prepare the data repositories. The grant also allowed us to hire two Research Assistants for this project: Paula Montano and Redmond Scales. Welcome aboard!

We hope you enjoy the new website and data. Thanks for visiting the page in the future, downloading the data, and spreading the word.

Best,
Tom Louwerse and Stefan Müller