Electoral systems and political manipulation - a case-study of northern-ireland in the 1920s

Abstract

Three general elections were held for the Northern Ireland Parliament during the 1920s. The 1921 and 1925 elections were contested using proportional representation, whereas the 1929 elections used the "first-past-the-post system". This paper analyses how the change in the electoral system reversed the trend towards political plurality reflected in the 1925 election results, and facilitated the hegemony of the Unionist Party which continued for 40 years. The paper also discusses how the new electoral system facilitated changes within the Unionist Party itself. The purpose of this paper is to examine the stability conditions obtained in some discrete specifications of a continuous time macroeconomic model in which the rate of inflation and the level of output are linked via an augmented Phillips curve and price expectations are formed adaptively. It is shown that if excess demand has a lagged influence on inflation in the Phillips curve, then dynamic instability is a strong empirical possibility. The implications of this result are commented upon.