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Legislatures are arenas where diverse policy preferences are honed into practical policy proposals. Given that legislative membership is a result of free democratic elections, there is an assumption that the attitudes and opinions of MPs are representative of the population as a whole. Thus, pre-legislative bargaining is founded on an unbiased sample of public opinion. However, considerable opinion incongruence exists between citizens and the political elite in many systems, potentially undermining this ideal democratic starting point for legislative business. Candidate-centred voting systems offer the potential to remedy this disconnect. While citizens tend to emphasise personal characteristics as an explanation for vote choice in one of the most candidate-centred systems in existence, PR-STV, the disconnect of opinion congruence between citizens and elites persists. This paper finds that citizens' emphasis on MPs' personal characteristics when choosing representatives causes significant opinion congruence between citizens and elites on a demographic basis, particularly for under-represented groups such as the women, younger citizens and those from lower socio-economic backgrounds, but aggregate congruence is undermined by the lack of demographic diversity among MPs.

This thesis examines the extent to which the distribution of politicians? social background characteristics is associated with attitude variation within political parties. It addresses the research question with quantitative and qualitative methods by examining the substantive attitudes of elite members to political issues and their multi-dimensional interpretations of those issues. To maximise the potential for a study of intra-party attitudes this thesis is a case study of Irish political parties. The Irish party system has been a puzzling case in political science for decades due to ?left? and ?right? never being a basis for inter-party competition, as is commonly found elsewhere. In Ireland, there is typically more attitude variation within parties than between them. However, the Irish political elite confonn to international trends in that they are not demographically representative of the Irish population. ; TARA (Trinity?s Access to Research Archive) has a robust takedown policy. Please contact us if you have any concerns: rssadmin@tcd.ie

The three-party coalition government formed in 2007 between Fianna Fail, the Green Party and the Progressive Democrats appeared to have a bulletproof majority, and there was every reason to expect that, like its two immediate predecessors, it would last the full five-year term. However, the global recession that began later that year and hit Ireland with full force in mid-2008 quickly reduced the likelihood that the government would survive until 2012. In September 2008 the crisis in the Irish banking system, which had overstretched its loan books far beyond the realms of prudence in the previous decade, was finally exposed following the collapse of Lehman Brothers. After the event there were many questions as to why neither political actors, nor Ireland's or the EU's regulatory system, had noticed the many warning signs. On 29 September 2008 the Irish government guaranteed the deposits and loanbooks of the six Irish banks, and over the next two years it nationalised or effectively nationalised all but one of these. Consequently, the debts and losses of the banks were taken on by the taxpayer and a huge debt crisis emerged. Trust in and support for the government dropped sharply and never recovered, though the government remained in office for over two more years. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]