Brian O’leary
Biographic Data
| ID | 279754 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Brian O’leary |
| GIVEN NAMES | Brian |
| FAMILY NAME | O’leary |
| SIGNATURE | O’LEARY B |
| AFFILIATIONS | London School of Economics and Political Science |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6786-8715 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 109 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1031 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 109 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1979 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 18 |
Preparing to Maximise Losers’ Consent in Contested Sovereignty Referendums: The Potential Case of Referendums on Irish Unification
Peaceful transitions in power, after elections or referendums, depend upon the acceptance of the outcomes of the contests by those who have lost – a phenomenon known as ‘losers’ consent’. Achieving losers’ consent is arguably most acute in contested sovereignty referendums. A public opinion strategy is required by those who advocate changing the sovereign status of a territory and who are subject to three constraints: (i) their wish to maximise l…
Toward the Final Curtain: Glimpses of an End Foretold
Review of Untied Kingdom: A Global History of the End of Britain , by Stuart Ward (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022)
The Perception of the Legitimacy of Citizens’ Assemblies in Deeply Divided Places? Evidence of Public and Elite Opinion from Consociational Northern Ireland
How much public and elite support is there for the use of a citizens’ assembly – a random selection of citizens brought together to consider a policy issue – to tackle major, deadlock-inducing disagreements in deeply divided places with consociational political institutions? We focus on Northern Ireland and use evidence from a cross-sectional attitude survey, a survey-based experiment and elite interviews. We find that the general public support …
Making Book Rights, Right
The future of Northern Ireland: Border anxieties and support for Irish reunification under varieties of UKexit
The paper assesses public attitudes in Northern Ireland towards the potential hardening of the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland as a result of the UK’s exit from the European Union. It investigates the relationship between border-related anxieties and support for a United Ireland. The study draws on specially designed qualitative and quantitative data, generated from a one-day citizens’ assembly and a representative att…
Explaining the Paradox of Plebiscites
Recent referendums show that autocratic regimes consult voters even if the outcome is a foregone conclusion. They have been doing so with increasing frequency since Napoleon consulted French citizens in 1800. Why and when do dictatorial regimes hold referendums they are certain they will win? Analysing the 162 referendums held in autocratic and non-free states in the period 1800–2012, the article shows that referendums with a 99% yes-vote tend to…
Public attitudes to different possible models of a United Ireland: Evidence from a citizens’ assembly in Northern Ireland
We empirically identify the considered views of the Northern Ireland public on the relative merits of two possible models of a united Ireland: an integrated united Ireland in which Northern Ireland is absorbed into an all-island polity, and a united Ireland in which Northern Ireland continues to exist as a devolved entity. We use data from a specially designed one-day citizens’ assembly. We report analyses based on quantitative examination of pre…
Confederal and Consociational Futures
The concluding chapter critically reviews the role of European integration in improving British-Irish relations, and in the making of the Good Friday Agreement. Four major votes across Northern Ireland between 2016 and 2017 are surveyed, paying particular attention to the 2016 referendum on EU membership. Predictions are made about the future of Northern Ireland and its union with Great Britain or its reunification with Ireland based on unfolding…
“No. Please Understand”: The Return to Imperial Direct Rule and the Limits to British Arbitration, 1972–1985
The return of direct rule to Northern Ireland in 1972 and its mechanisms and conduct are outlined in this chapter. Their impact upon the local political party system is treated at length, as are the first consociational initiatives pursued under Conservative and Labour governments in the UK. The failure of the first peace process is considered, as well as Britain’s counterinsurgency policies and their limits. Criminalization, Ulsterization, and N…
The Making, Meaning(s), and Tasks of the 1998 Agreement
This chapter provides a detailed account of the contents and significance of the Belfast or Good Friday Agreement of 1998, and of its consociational and non-consociational components. It conforms to all aspects of a consociational settlement—namely, parity, proportionality, autonomy, and veto rights among the partners—but it is not just a consociation. The agreement encompasses a peace agreement, a substantive program to complete the reform of No…
A Tract of Time between War and Peace: Melding Negotiations and a Peace Process, and the Making of the Belfast and the British–Irish Agreements, 1992–1998
This chapter describes and explains the emergence and development of the Irish peace process. It discusses how the previously suspended inter-party and intergovernmental talks begun under the auspices of the Anglo-Irish Agreement were melded with that process. The Framework Documents that anticipated the 1998 Agreement are analysed, as well as the bargaining about bargaining that preceded the 1997–8 negotiations. The republican and loyalist cease…
An Experiment in Coercive Consociation: The Making, Meaning(s), and Outcomes of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, 1985–1992
The making of the Anglo-Irish Agreement (AIA) of 1985 is examined in detail, and interpretations of its significance are assessed. Was the AIA simply a form of inter-governmentalism, or was it tacitly or unintentionally a project to incentivize unionists to favor power-sharing? That is, is it best interpreted as a coercive way of promoting consociation? The impact of the 1985 AIA is assessed across parties, movements, and paramilitaries, and in p…
Conceptual Conspectus: Consociation and Arbitration
This chapter explains the development of the concepts of consociation and arbitration in political science. Full consociations reference political systems characterized by parity, proportionality, autonomy, and veto powers among the several parties to the pact. There are, however, important variations in the manner and the extent to which consociations are formally institutionalized. Arbitration defines political roles and policies through which …
The Long Negotiation: The Tribunes Become Consuls, 2002–2016
This chapter explains how both the IRA and the DUP were fully incorporated into the 1998 Agreement, even if the former saw it as transitional, whereas the latter pretended it was not working within its provisions. The striking success of simply having a sustained period of cooperative power-sharing is celebrated, and a full comparison is made with the Sunningdale Agreement of 1973–4. The Rise and Fall of the House of Paisley is considered. Sinn F…
Terminology
Charges of ethnic or sectarian bias accompany writing on Northern Ireland because terminology raises complex questions about objectivity. The following pedantry is therefore required. “Northern Ireland” is here the formal political unit, not the “Six Counties” or “Ulster,” as republicans and loyalists respectively prefer. Ulster refers here to “historic Ulster”—that is, the province of nine northern counties of pre-1920 Ireland, and Northern Irel…
A Treatise on Northern Ireland, Volume I: Colonialism
O’Leary’s authoritative treatment of the history of Northern Ireland and its current prospects is genuinely unique. Beginning with an in-depth account of the scale of the recent conflict, he sets out to explain why Northern Ireland recently had the highest incidence of political violence in twentieth-century western Europe. Volume 1 demonstrates the salience of the colonial past in accounting for current collective mentalities, institutions, and …
A Treatise on Northern Ireland, Volume III: Consociation and Confederation
O’Leary’s authoritative treatment of the history of Northern Ireland and its current prospects is genuinely unique. Beginning with an in-depth account of the scale of the recent conflict, he sets out to explain why Northern Ireland recently had the highest incidence of political violence in twentieth-century western Europe. Volume 1 demonstrates the salience of the colonial past in accounting for current collective mentalities, institutions, and …
Consociation in the Present
Consociation, one type of power‐sharing, is perhaps the least appreciated. This article reviews and replies to a collection celebrating Arend Lijphart’s pioneering article on consociational democracy published in 1969. The consociational perspective retains its interpretive power, including in the examination of major polities, such as the European Union, the Indian Union, and the USA. In the classical cases, consociational persistence in Belgium…
Party images in Northern Ireland: Evidence From a New Dataset
The literature on belief systems in mass publics shows that survey respondents typically have difficulty in describing their images of political parties; only about half offer a meaningful description of how they see individual parties. This paper investigates what people in Northern Ireland think that parties stand for in their home jurisdiction, in Great Britain and in the Republic of Ireland, using open-ended questions in a survey of 1,008 Nor…
The Twilight of the United Kingdom & Tiocfaidh ár lá: Twenty Years after the Good Friday Agreement
The Good Friday or Belfast Agreement was reached just over 20 years ago. This article introduces a special issue devoted to appraising its subsequent trajectory. It provides a brief resumé of the Agreement’s contents as a peace agreement, and as a regional consociation with confederal and federal possibilities. The outworkings and partial implementation of the Agreement are reviewed against a theoretical appraisal of the circumstances under which…
Postscript: New British Questions or 2019 And All That
William Caruthers Sellars and Robert Yeatman famously satirized the teaching of the history of England in 1930. A fresh version of their work is long overdue, perhaps with the provisional title 201
Orientalism
European social and political thought about Asia, the Middle East, and Islamic civilization has been called “orientalism” by its critics; it is seen as a subset of “Eurocentric” understandings of the world. One rejoinder to orientalism is to make counter‐accusations of “occidentalism.” These arguments are descendants of arguments about oriental despotism, oriental society, and the Asiatic mode of production, which were especially prominent during…
Walker Connor (1926–2017): A tribute
Walker Connor was born in 1926, and was contemporaneous with my own father, so not surprisingly he was a father figure to me. Unlike my own father Walker made it past 90. Those of us privileged to have been Walker's friend will miss his mischievous humor and twinkling eyes, and his fondness for combining rich conversation with craft beers. Indeed his son Dan told me Walker deliberately had a beer a couple of days before he died. All will be pleas…
For the Long-Run: Avoiding the Temptations of the Status Quo, Rancour, and Self-Pity
This article updates the author's article which opens this issue, and responds to the other contributions. Composed over the winter of 2011–2012, the opening paper was commissioned for a private conference held in Europe. The difficulties academics from Israel or Palestine (and elsewhere) experience in convening to discuss the subject matter explain why the conference was private. It was not officially conceived as a ‘track-two’ contribution to t…
Power-Sharing and Partition amid Israel–Palestine
This paper reviews the deep difficulties entailed in achieving a two-state solution to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. It shows that there are equally deep difficulties in seeking to achieve standard power-sharing prescriptions in the region. The status quo, however, is neither acceptable nor likely to be stable in the medium term. A power-sharing perspective may, however, productively assist in making a two-state solution work be…
Extremist Outbidding in Ethnic Party Systems is Not Inevitable: Tribune Parties in Northern Ireland
The ethnic outbidding thesis predicts centrifugal polarisation in ethnically divided party systems. We argue instead that the incentives of power-sharing institutions can encourage the development of electoral strategies based on ‘ethnic tribune appeals’ in which parties combine robust ethnic identity representation with increased pragmatism over resource allocation. We test these arguments in Northern Ireland and show that though evidence of dir…
The Northern Ireland Conflict: Consociational Engagements
The book collects some of the major essays, past and new, of two of the leading authorities on the Northern Ireland conflict. The essays cover a wide range of topics, from the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, and the management of Northern Ireland by successive Labour and Conservative governments between 1974 and 1997, to an analysis of the 1998 Agreement, and the issues of policing and human rights reform in the aftermath of that agreement. The bo…
Consociational Theory, Northern Ireland's Conflict, and its Agreement. Part 1: What Consociationalists Can Learn from Northern Ireland
In the first of two articles the authors show what consociational theory may learn from the case of Northern Ireland, namely, the importance of external agencies in making and implementing consociational settlements, the relations between consociational and self-determination settlements, the ‘complexity’ of internal settlements, the merits of STV (PR) in electoral arrangements, innovations in using proportional representation decision rules to a…
Consociational Theory, Northern Ireland's Conflict, and its Agreement 2.-What Critics of Consociation Can Learn from Northern Ireland
In the second of two articles the authors show what integrationist critics of consociational theory can learn from the case of Northern Ireland, namely, that consociation may be more realistic than integration, that a ‘grand coalition’ may have more virtue than the ‘minimum-winning’ variety, that consociations can be both liberal and democratic, and that PR-STV has considerable advantages over integrationists’ preferred electoral system, the Alte…
The Limits to Coercive Consociationalism in Northern Ireland
The merits of consociation as a means of solving the Northern Ireland conflict are presented through contrasting it with other ways of stabilizing highly divided political systems. Why voluntary consociation has been unsuccessful in Northern Ireland and unfortunately is likely to remain so is explained. The signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement (AIA) must be understood against the background of the failure of previous consociational experiments. T…
An iron law of nationalism and federation: A (neo-Diceyian) theory of the necessity of a federal Staatsvolk, and of consociational rescue
The Danish Cartoon Affair: Free Speech, Racism, Islamism, and Integration
The Conservative Stewardship of Northern Ireland, 1979–97: Sound-Bottomed Contradictions or Slow Learning
Oscar Wilde thought it took a heart of stone not to laugh at the demise of the heroine of one of Dickens' sentimental novels. The same idea arises when asked to re ect upon eighteen years of Conservative government on the politics of Northern Ireland. Solemnity is called for, but the oddities of these years mean that horselaughs are tempting. Remarkable inconsistencies or contradictions, as Marxists say, have characterized the Northern Irish poli…
Divisor Methods for Sequential Portfolio Allocation in Multi‐Party Executive Bodies: Evidence from Northern Ireland and Denmark
Some proportional representation (PR) rules can also be used to specify the sequence in which each party in a parliament or each member in a multiparty governing coalition is given its choice about (unique) desired resources, e.g., “indivisible goods” such as cabinet ministries or executive positions, thus providing an algorithmic method for determining “fair” allocations. Divisor rule sequencing using the d'Hondt method was recently used to dete…
Must Pluri-national Federations Fail
This article questions the widely held assumption that pluri-national federations are likely to break down or break apart. It shows that the case against pluri-national federalism needs to be substantively qualified, and then outlines the conditions that facilitate successful pluri-national federations. The argument is preliminary in nature, but suggests a more balanced and nuanced account of the durability of pluri-national federations than is a…
Northern Irish Voters and the British–Irish Agreement: Foundations of a Stable Consociational Settlement
The Perception of the Legitimacy of Citizens’ Assemblies in Deeply Divided Places? Evidence of Public and Elite Opinion from Consociational Northern Ireland
How much public and elite support is there for the use of a citizens’ assembly – a random selection of citizens brought together to consider a policy issue – to tackle major, deadlock-inducing disagreements in deeply divided places with consociational political institutions? We focus on Northern Ireland and use evidence from a cross-sectional attitude survey, a survey-based experiment and elite interviews. We find that the general public support …
A Treatise on Northern Ireland, Volume III: Consociation and Confederation
O’Leary’s authoritative treatment of the history of Northern Ireland and its current prospects is genuinely unique. Beginning with an in-depth account of the scale of the recent conflict, he sets out to explain why Northern Ireland recently had the highest incidence of political violence in twentieth-century western Europe. Volume 1 demonstrates the salience of the colonial past in accounting for current collective mentalities, institutions, and …
Five fallacies: Northern Ireland and the liabilities of liberalism
Five fallacies in the misinterpretation of conflict in Northern Ireland, which are characteristic of liberal readings of ethno-national conflicts, are identified and criticized in this article: (i) blaming the conflict on extremist political and religious élites; (ii) assuming that the conflict has fundamental economic and material foundations; (iii) assuming that the conflict flows from archaic religious or non-religious political cultures; (iv)…
On the Nature of Nationalism: An Appraisal of Ernest Gellner's Writings on Nationalism
Ernest Gellner's is the best-known modernist explanatory theory of nationalism. This article summarizes its expression and development before considering its strengths and weaknesses. Discussion centres on Gellner's functionalist mode of explanation, the place of nationalism in his philosophy of history, the predictive and retrodictive nature of his theory, and the merits of his typology of nationalism. The apolitical character of his writings is…
Power-Sharing Executives: Consociational and Centripetal Formulae and the Case of Northern Ireland
Power-sharing coalitions in deeply divided places can take centripetal or consociational forms. Respectively, these aim to foster moderation and inclusivity by restricting coalitions to moderate parties or proportionately to incorporate the main political forces. Using the case of Northern Ireland (1973–2015), this article assesses the merits of a particular consociational coalition, based on sequential and proportional allocation rules, by contr…
Measuring Quality of Life in Informal Settlements in South Africa
Autonomy, Sovereignty and Self-Determination: The Accommodation of Conflicting Rights
Prime Ministers and the Commons: Patterns of Behaviour, 1868 to 1987
Since 1868 nineteen Prime Ministers have answered parliamentary questions, made statements, given major speeches, and intervened in debates in the House of Commons. This article presents a comparative and quantitative analysis of PMS' behaviour patterns on these four dimensions. Key findings include: the importance of 1940 as the critical break between a traditional and a modem form of parliamentary activity, in which Prime Ministers make fewer c…
The future of Northern Ireland: Border anxieties and support for Irish reunification under varieties of UKexit
The paper assesses public attitudes in Northern Ireland towards the potential hardening of the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland as a result of the UK’s exit from the European Union. It investigates the relationship between border-related anxieties and support for a United Ireland. The study draws on specially designed qualitative and quantitative data, generated from a one-day citizens’ assembly and a representative att…
Why Northern Ireland’s Institutions Need Stability
Northern Ireland’s consociational institutions were reviewed by a committee of its Assembly in 2012–13. The arguments of both critics and exponents of the arrangements are of general interest to scholars of comparative politics, power-sharing and constitutional design. The authors of this article review the debates and evidence on the d’Hondt rule of executive formation, political designation, the likely impact of changing district magnitudes for…
Analysing partition: Definition, classification and explanation
The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism: The Gaelic Revival and the Creation of the Irish Nation State
Public attitudes to different possible models of a United Ireland: Evidence from a citizens’ assembly in Northern Ireland
We empirically identify the considered views of the Northern Ireland public on the relative merits of two possible models of a united Ireland: an integrated united Ireland in which Northern Ireland is absorbed into an all-island polity, and a united Ireland in which Northern Ireland continues to exist as a devolved entity. We use data from a specially designed one-day citizens’ assembly. We report analyses based on quantitative examination of pre…
Courts and Consociations, or How Human Rights Courts May De-stabilize Power-sharing Settlements
We consider the use of consociational arrangements to manage ethno-nationalist, ethno-linguistic, and ethno-religious conflicts, and their compatibility with non-discrimination and equality norms. Key questions include to what extent, if any, consociations conflict with the dictates of global justice and the liberal individualist preferences of international human rights institutions, and to what extent consociational power-sharing may be justifi…
Space Manufacturing, Satellite Power and Human Exploration
Satellite power stations manufactured from non terrestrial materials may alleviate the global energy crisis as early as the 1990s. Costs may be competitive with coal and nuclear power and could provide an environmentally acceptable, inexhaustible and continuous supply of electricity anywhere on Earth. Habitats for the workforce employed in space manufacturing would offer a choice of gravities for living and recreation. Recent progress in this fie…
Theories of the State: The Politics of Liberal Democracy
This book offers the first accessible, systematic study of the five schools of thought that dominate modern political science in the West. The authors give an account of the intellectual origins and the methodology of pluralism, the New Right, elitism, Marxism, and neo-pluralism-concentrating on the models of political mobilization, state organization, and crisis that are posited by each. Dunleavy and O'Leary end with a strikingly original evalua…
British Farce, French Drama and Tales of Two Cities: Reorganizations of Paris and London Governments 1957–86
Comparing the evidence of London and Paris reorganizations in the last three decades confirms that political interventions are often autonomous of administrative or class logic. Reorganizations are not mere registers of the subterranean workings of socio‐economic forces. However, the reorganizations show that these political interventions are not autonomous from the characteristics of their respective political systems
Towards Europeanisation and realignment: The Irish general election, February 1987
The Anglo‐Irish agreement: Folly or statecraft
This article analyses the significance of the Anglo‐Irish Agreement, and using research and interview material critically assesses explanations as to why it was signed. An interim evaluation of the consequences of the Agreement up to 12 July 1986 is made before considering the prospects of the Agreement's survival. A brief normative defence of the Agreement is also presented
The Odyssey of Jon Elster
Jon Elster has made the story of Ulysses and the Sirens a central motif in his philosophical odyssey. In Elster's philosophy a paradigm of imperfectly rational behaviour is to bind yourself against the mast, as a precaution against the predictable weakness of your will which would otherwise leave you ensnared by the sirens. The use of literary analogies is frequent in Elster's work, whether he is Explaining Technical Change or Making Sense of Mar…
Why was the GLC abolished
Short reviews
Ralf Dahrendorf, THE MODERN SOCIAL CONFLICT: AN ESSAY ON THE POLITICS OF LIBERTY, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988, xvi + 219 pp., £16.95. John Rex, THE GHETTO AND THE UNDERCLASS: ESSAYS ON RACE AND SOCIAL POLICY, Aldershot: Avebury, 1988, 140 pp., £21.00. Conor Cruise O'Brien, GODLAND: REFLECTIONS ON RELIGION AND NATIONALISM, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988, £9.95 (paper). Simon Jones, BLACK CULTURE, WHITE YOUTH: TH…
The Limits to Coercive Consociationalism in Northern Ireland
The merits of consociation as a means of solving the Northern Ireland conflict are presented through contrasting it with other ways of stabilizing highly divided political systems. Why voluntary consociation has been unsuccessful in Northern Ireland and unfortunately is likely to remain so is explained. The signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement (AIA) must be understood against the background of the failure of previous consociational experiments. T…
The National Question: Decolonising the Theory of Nationalism
Northern Ireland and the Anglo-Irish Agreement
Northern Ireland’s politics are antagonistic. The Anglo-Irish Agreement (AIA), signed at Hillsborough in November 1985 by the Prime Ministers of the UK and the Republic of Ireland, Margaret Thatcher and Dr Garret FitzGerald, was designed to replace antagonism with accommodation, to promote peace and reconciliation between the two traditions in Northern Ireland and within both parts of Ireland, and to consolidate better relations between Britain a…
Prime Ministers and the Commons: Patterns of Behaviour, 1868 to 1987
Since 1868 nineteen Prime Ministers have answered parliamentary questions, made statements, given major speeches, and intervened in debates in the House of Commons. This article presents a comparative and quantitative analysis of PMS' behaviour patterns on these four dimensions. Key findings include: the importance of 1940 as the critical break between a traditional and a modem form of parliamentary activity, in which Prime Ministers make fewer c…
Further Europeanisation? The Irish general election of June 1989
Setting the Record Straight: A Comment on Cahill's Country Report on Ireland
The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism: The Gaelic Revival and the Creation of the Irish Nation State
The Asiatic Mode of Production: Oriental Despotism, Historical Materialism and Indian History
An Taoiseach: The Irish prime minister
1991). An Taoiseach: The Irish prime minister. West European Politics: Vol. 14, West European Prime Minister, pp. 133-162
Public Opinion and Northern Irish Futures
Affairs, partner‐swapping, and spring tides: The Irish general election of November 1992
Autonomy, Sovereignty and Self-Determination: The Accommodation of Conflicting Rights
Inequality in Northern Ireland
The Political Regulation of National and Ethnic Conflict
Afterword: What is framed in the Framework Documents
The texts published in February 1995 by the British and Irish governments, known as the Joint Framework Documents (although only one document was properly joint), are scrutinized in this article. The documents show the extent to which both governments have learned to manage and analyse the conflict as nationally driven. They also offer the most imaginative texts produced by liberal democratic sovereign governments negotiating the future of a bi-e…
Five fallacies: Northern Ireland and the liabilities of liberalism
Five fallacies in the misinterpretation of conflict in Northern Ireland, which are characteristic of liberal readings of ethno-national conflicts, are identified and criticized in this article: (i) blaming the conflict on extremist political and religious élites; (ii) assuming that the conflict has fundamental economic and material foundations; (iii) assuming that the conflict flows from archaic religious or non-religious political cultures; (iv)…
Introduction: Reflections on a cold peace
The complete cessation of armed violence by the major paramilitary organizations in Northern Ireland provides an opportunity for academic reflection on the past twenty-five years of ethnic conflict. This article introduces a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies. It provides a brief account of how the shooting stopped, reflects on the quietist nature of much recent academic commentary on the region, explains the contents of the special issue…
Political science (95 works) · Law (84 works) · Sociology (80 works) · Politics (68 works) · Irish and British Studies (60 works) · Law (50 works) · Political economy (40 works) · Philosophy (38 works) · Economics (29 works) · Ethnology (28 works)