As most watchers of European politics probably know already, Ireland has just passed a constitutional referendum allowing it to accede to the Lisbon Treaty by a “whopping majority of 67%”:http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2009/1003/breaking1.htm. This is surprising, given that a similar vote last year (some small concessions were made in the meantime by Ireland’s EU partners) saw the Lisbon Treaty being rejected by a 6% margin. So what changed in the meantime?
Unfortunately, we don’t have any very good evidence from opinion poll crosstabs, exit polls etc. It may be that someone has conducted a flash poll in the aftermath of the referendum (Eurobarometer did this last time), which may provide a little more data. In the meantime, my thoroughly non-scientific, open to challenge etc rough ranking of the plausible reasons why it was different this time around.
(1) Better campaigning by the Yes side. In the last referendum, while the main political parties advocated a Yes vote (with the exception of the Greens, who were more or less in favor), they didn’t exert themselves especially hard to persuade voters until the closing days of the campaign, when it was too late. This time around, anecdotal evidence suggests that the Yes campaign was much better organized. It also had a single – and very articulate – spokesperson in the form of Pat Cox, former president of the European Parliament.
This was important, because the “flash survey”:http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/flash/fl_245_en.pdf last time around suggested that the most important reason why people voted No was because they did not know enough about the Treaty (11% of No voters actually thought that the referendum would, on balance, be good for Ireland). The No campaign did an excellent job of convincing voters that if they did not understand the Treaty, their default position should be to vote No. They pointed out that Ireland would still continue to be a member of the EU. Pro-Treaty politicians did little to explain the Treaty’s presumed benefits – largely because they did not themselves have an especially good understanding of the Treaty, instead relying on generic nostrums about how good Europe had been for Ireland in the past. This time, in contrast, the Yes campaign did a better job in explaining what the Treaty did, and, more importantly, what it did not do, aggressively targeting some of the bogus claims that No proponents had made about abortion, minimum wages etc.
Campaigning effects often wash out in electoral politics, because both sides have similar incentives to win, and to organize as best they can. Here, in contrast, we saw a referendum where one side was far more organized than the other in the initial Lisbon vote, but where these differences evaporated in the second vote (where, if anything, the Yes side was better organized than the No side).
(2) Increased turnout. There was a significant increase in turnout from 53.1% last year to 58% this time around. We don’t have any data on who turned out this time who didn’t the last time, or vice versa. My best guess would be that we saw substantially increased turnout among middle and upper class voters (who are far more likely to favor the Yes position), and static or decreased turnout among working class voters (who are more likely to favor the No position in relative terms). My guess is based on the seat-of-the-pants perception that the salience of the vote was higher among middle class voters than last time round, and that working class voters had other things to worry about given (3).
(3) A change in economic circumstances. Ireland’s GDP is predicted to shrink by anything up to 12% this year, in contrast to last year when the vote was taken just before the economic crisis began to bite. This may be one reason for changing patterns in turnout (working class voters are more likely to be hurt by the recession, and hence perhaps less likely to vote). But it also may have decreased voters’ willingness to ‘go it alone’ against the rest of the EU. Elite consensus seems to have hardened around the opinion that Ireland would have been far worse affected by the recession had it not been an EU member. You could argue this both ways on the empirical merits – while liquidity support from other member states surely helped, a stringent monetary policy probably hurt and will continue to hurt Ireland (Iceland, which was far worse affected initially, may end up recovering more quickly). But whether the belief was justified or not by facts, it plausibly had significant ideological consequences, perhaps shifting the default position for many voters from ‘No’ to ‘Yes.’ Perhaps voter irrationality – the quick succession of an extremely severe recession after the last vote, had psychological consequences too.
(4) Perhaps most interesting was the effect which did _not_ bark in the event. As best as we can guess, voters who blame the (extremely unpopular) government for the current economic crisis did not vote No as a protest against the government in anything like the numbers one might have expected. The referendum carried by an extremely wide margin, even against the backdrop of recession and a deeply unpopular bailout of the banks. This is surely in part due to the fact that the major opposition parties supported the referendum too. But it is surprising to me that there was not more evidence of a generic anti-system vote under the circumstances.
Again, take this all this analysis with a grain of salt – in the absence of proper data it is somewhere between loose hypothesizing with big fat ecological problems, standard-issue punditizing and sheer guesswork. But until and unless actual data becomes available, educated guesswork may be the best we can do.