Party loyalty and Irish voters - reply

Abstract

Informed and constructive criticism is always to be welcomed. However, we feel obliged to comment on a number of points raised by Mr Gillman in his extended examination of our paper. Our inclusion of spoilt votes does create a limited amount of 'noise', but cannot be said to confuse the situation or to obscure a really simple pattern. Spoilt votes, like 'non-votes', are important parts of any electoral decision, and we included in our study indicators of spoilage and of voter turnout so as not to exclude any potentially valuable information. In fact, spoilt votes showed no significant pattern between 1969 and 1972, a fact which is in itself of interest, particularly for the contrast it affords with the extreme regularities we found elsewhere, and also because it seems to reflect the absence of any widespread expression of political alienation - this kind of sentiment being one possible explanation for widespread and systematic vote spoilage.