How Ireland Voted 2011: The Full Story of Ireland's Earthquake Election

preferences of the median citizen and of their own voters. Most importantly, elections, by facilitating alternation in government, increase policy congruence between citizens’ preferences and those of their newly elected government compared to those of the previous government. Unfortunately, the evidence presented does not demonstrate whether or how policy congruence between political parties and voters has changed over time. Perhaps one caveat to these chapters is that they analyse congruence by relying on mass survey data for citizens’ self-placement on the left– right scale and their perceptions of the positions of parties on this scale. As a result, the analysis relies on citizen’s perceptions of where the parties are positioned and not necessarily on the positions that parties hold in the election. Though the authors partly overcome this by comparing citizens’ assessment of parties’ positions with other measures of assessment that derive from experts’ opinions, elite positions and the programmatic commitments that parties make in the pre-election period, finding congruence across most of those measures (Chapter 5). In the conclusion, the authors offer an interpretation of their evidence which argues that parties are not in decline but are simply different, having successfully adapted to the changing circumstances in which they operate. They argue that the ways in which parties have addressed these challenges and changed circumstances have not compromised their key functions in the chain of democratic linkage. However, while the empirical analyses in this study provide us with evidence as to whether parties continue to fulfil their key functions, they do not tell us if as a result parties and democracy work the same, better or worse. The authors themselves acknowledge that their findings point to a kind of paradox. Though parties appear to have adapted well and survived the challenges in the environment in which they operate, the public has become increasingly sceptical about and dissatisfied with political parties. Could it be that the evidence presented in this study points to the fact that there is no realistic alternative that can fulfil the functions of political parties and this alone ensures their survival, even if they are in decline in the eyes of the public? The ways in which parties have adapted does not necessarily ensure the avoidance of parties being in decline in certain respects; nor that through these adaptations they have managed to preserve the quality of democratic representation.