Sinn Fein are abstentionist with regard to the UK Parliament: they (supposedly) refuse to take an oath of allegiance to the British monarch and thus are unable to participate in Parliament.
So why do people vote for them? If you knew that the person you were thinking of voting for would not represent you at all, what reason would you have to vote for them? Why doesn’t another party run on the exact same platform, but with the goal in mind to actually participate and try to get their views heard? Is it because there’s no chance that Sinn Fein’s viewpoint is in anyway going to tweak discussion or potential bills, and thus there’s no reason to even try to influence them? As a voter, isn’t my desire to choose the candidate that will best represent my views? Isn’t it impossible for my views to be represented if my MP doesn’t attend?
The only logical solution is that it’s all a measure how how much support their position has, represented in a way that deals a blow to the foundations they are trying to shake: “Your government has so little support here, they’ll elect someone who refuses to participate”. Still, that’s only really a marketing pitch; what’s in it for the voter?
Obviously it is a protest vote. Better than “none of the above”. Here is Quebec, there used to be a Rhino party dedicated to the absurd. They got a quite a few protest votes, but eventually, it got too expensive. Quebec still elects a large number (usually 50 or so of the 75 seats here) of Parti Québecois candidates who are ciphers unless there is a minority government (as there is now).
Hari, I assume you mean Bloc Quebecois. However, In the standard business of members of Parliament (the role of citizen ombudsperson for various government business, serving on Parliamentary committees, voting on bills and participating in debate, and so forth), BQ members serve to the same extent that other members serve.
This was especially noticeable in the early 90s when the BQ were the Official Opposition (in a majority parliament).
Now, I certainly agree that it’s rather pointless to elect BQ members to a parliament whose legitimacy they don’t recognize and whose service to the citizens they have the opposite of an interest in improving, but that really is much different from Sinn Fein members not taking their seats at all.
You mean the Bloc québécois. But that’s not comparable to the OP’s example: Bloc MPs do take their seats and influence the workings of Parliament; at one point they were actually the official opposition and they are likely largely responsible for the fact that there is a minority government right now. What they cannot do is form the government. For many they are probably a protest vote – while I disagree with many of their policies, I vote for them because right now I do not trust any other party – but clearly voting for them isn’t a wasted vote.
The Rhinoceros Party was a better example, and at their top in the early 80s they were getting large amounts of votes and even managed to place a candidate in second position in one particular election. The reason why they were so popular was, quite likely, that the Bloc didn’t exist at the time. Many Quebec nationalists wouldn’t vote for the Liberal Party (Trudeau’s party) nor for the Progressive-Conservative Party before Mulroney managed to attract them and Western populists for the 1984 election, and felt that they shouldn’t even be sending MPs to Ottawa in the first place, so a protest party made sense. And many Rhino candidates were artists, celebrities, or other interesting people, so voting for them was an attractive proposition.
Well, Sinn Fein does participate actively in the Northern Ireland Assembly, so it’s not a completely impotent party; if you subscribe to their policies and ideology and vote for them in the Northern Ireland Assembly, it won’t feel quite as useless when you vote their MPs into an institution they don’t acknowledge. The direct reason they cite for refusing to participate in the UK Parliament is because all members have to swear allegiance to the Queen. But more broadly, that represents their objection to the entire concept of Northern Ireland being a part of the UK at all.
Why doesn’t another party run on the exact same platform, but with the goal in mind to actually participate and try to get their views heard?
There is another nationalist party- the SDLP, and their members do participate in Westminster. In the recent elections there were some constituencies whre the SDLP and Sinn Fein had pacts- i.e. the SDLP candidate withdrew in one constituency, and the Sinn Fein candidate withdrew in another. This ensured that the Nationalist vote wasn’t split and thus the Nationalist candidate was more likely to win. Sometimes in Northern Ireland it isn’t about who gets in, it is about who stays out.
Sinn Fein is very left wing (Marxist) politically with an Irish Nationalist leaning- the idea that the 4 Sinn Fein MPs would be able to signficantly influence policy to the extent that it would reflect their party’s iedology if only they took up their Westminster seats is laughable.
That might be the best possible representation of SF voters’ views, vis-à-vis the UK Parliament.
Today’s major Irish political party (in both the Republic and the North) known as Sinn Féin is leftist, but not Marxist; the Communist element of the Republican movement (which is actually less interested in abstentionism) separated in the 1969-70 split, and is now mainly constituted in the Workers’ Party of Ireland.
Actually, your last sentence sums up the direct reason they cite for their abstention. The oath isn’t the critical issue (see here).
As to why people vote for them anyway, here are a few reasons.
A lot of their voters agree with them on this issue.
The chance of them having any influence, as a handful (currently five) MPs out of 650, is slim enough not to be a key reason for people to make their voting decisions.
Since power was devolved to the Northern assembly that’s seen as where the real action is.
The alternatives aren’t terribly appealing. The SDLP haven’t really made any impact in Westminster (partially due to #2 - and their attendance record at Westminster hasn’t been great anyway). Crossing the unionist/nationalist divide is simply unthinkable to most voters, and the smaller parties have failed to gain widespread support for a variety of reasons
… who didn’t even put forward candidates in the election. Can’t get much more abstentionist than that!
Incidentally, there are Communist/Marxist republicans in a variety of Irish parties, including the Irish Republican Socialist Party, Éirígí, and the Communist Party of Ireland. There are some in Sinn Féin too. But the party’s policies are more accurately described as being on the left side of social democratic than truly Marxist.
Irish Republicanism has a long tradition of abstensionism from London politics. Politics in Norn Iron is conducted on tribal lines; you vote for your side’s man regardless of who he is or what his platform is. As a result there have been many elections where the vote for each side scarcely changes, regardless of political or economic developments.
I don’t see why it must. The most abstentionist party in Ireland is Republican Sinn Féin, who split from SF in 1987 over the latter’s decision to end their abstentionist policy in the South. They don’t field candidates for either Westminster in the North or the Dáil in the South. I think this might have to do with some procedural requirements that they see as amounting to recognition of those institutions’ authority over their respective parts of Ireland, whereas they would only consider a single all-Ireland assembly to be legitimate.
I don’t disagree on either of these points and I’m not sure why you’re taking an argumentative tone here.
I’m not arguing with anyone, and the only assertion in the thread I flatly disputed was the one that SF is Marxist.
Okay, fair enough. While I concur in the ideal, since 23 May 1998, I’d consider it something of a vanity position to not participate in the Irish institutions of government.