Charles Little
Biographic Data
| ID | 690738 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Charles Little |
| GIVEN NAMES | Charles |
| FAMILY NAME | Little |
| SIGNATURE | LITTLE C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Limerick |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5510-3195 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 207 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
The general election of November 2024 in the Republic of Ireland: Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael renew their vows
In the 2024 Irish elections, the main governing parties emerged more-or-less unscathed, with the largest party, Fianna Fáil, growing its seat share. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael continued to lead the government, consolidating the core of a new coalition formula. As in 2020–2024, the political landscape would involve a centre-right government facing a predominantly left-of-centre opposition led by Sinn Féin. The far right did not make significant inr…
Coalition Preferences and Party Systems
Giovanni Sartori suggested that in order to understand party systems, we need to focus on interactions between parties. These interactions have been conceptualised by Sartorian scholars as the structure of competition for control of the executive, and operationalised as patterns of government formation. This ‘government formation’ approach to party systems has limitations, chief among which is that it focuses on relations between government parti…
Understanding the Conflict of Conflicts: Is Left-Right Conflict a Necessary Condition for the Development of New Politics
One of the most significant changes in West European politics in the past 40 years is the emergence of the new cultural divide. However, there is substantial variation in how the issues comprising this new divide have manifested themselves in party systems. This raises the question of what mechanisms bring these issues into established party systems. The literature has so far focused on new political parties and critical junctures. This article a…
Party organisation and the party-delegate style of representation
Politicians perceive their representative role in a variety of ways: as a delegate of their party, a delegate of voters, or a trustee who exercises their mandate independent of any external principal. Existing research finds that the tendency to adopt a specific style of representation depends on system-level institutions and individuals’ political experience and profile. The influence of the party organisational context remains little understood…
The legislative agenda in Ireland, 1922–2021
This article analyses the legislative agenda in Ireland since 1922 using new data coded within the Comparative Agendas Project framework. The data, generated using the codebook of the Irish Policy Agendas Project (http://irishpolicyagendas.eu/), show clear evidence of long-term changes in the complexity, issue focus, and Europeanisation of the legislative agenda in Ireland. The study uses the Irish case to test some existing arguments concerning …
Symposium introduction: The politics of public policy in Ireland
The issue content of party politics in Ireland: A new perspective on the Irish party system and its development
The Irish party system has been exceptional both for the weakness of its left-right conflict and for its long-run stability. How then can party competition on policy, and particularly competition between the main parties, be characterised? This study examines the Irish party system from an issue competition perspective, examining the party system agenda and asking whether Irish party competition is marked by differences in issue focus. New data f…
The Party System: At a Critical Juncture
This chapter focuses on the attributes and development of the Irish party system, describing its structure and where it sits in comparative perspective. As well as examining party size and ideology, the chapter applies Peter Mair’s conceptualization of the party system as the structure of competition for control of the executive to the Irish case. In doing so, it explores the relationship between electoral change and party system change, arguing …
Change gradually, then all at once: The general election of February 2020 in the Republic of Ireland
At the general election of February 2020, Sinn Féin won a plurality of the vote in the Republic of Ireland for the first time. The party system remained highly fragmented and, with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael refusing to enter government with Sinn Féin, government formation took a record 20 weeks. Those 20 weeks coincided with the emergence of the Covid-19 public health emergency in Europe. A minority caretaker government introduced significant pol…
Party competition on climate policy: The roles of interest groups, ideology and challenger parties in the UK and Ireland
This study shows how interest group–party relations, parties’ cross-cutting policy preferences, and competition with challenger parties shape the structure of issue competition on climate policy. It uses the ‘most similar’ cases of the UK and Ireland to show how differences in party systems influence the structure of issue competition. The study takes up the challenge of integrating salience and position in the conceptualisation of climate policy…
Without enemies, without friends. Morality policies, the Roman Catholic Church, and Ireland’s ‘secular’ party system
The ‘two worlds of morality politics’ framework suggests that the historical structure of the party system has a major influence on the politics of morality issues. This study uses the case of Ireland to examine that proposition. Ireland is unusual in that it combines the absence of an historical church-state conflict in its party system with an historically strong Roman Catholic Church. It is therefore a ‘critical case’ for the ‘two worlds’ fram…
Climate politics in small European states
Drivers of political parties' climate policy preferences: Lessons from Denmark and Ireland
Political parties are important actors in domestic climate politics. What drives variation in parties’ climate policy preferences? To contribute to a growing literature on the party politics of climate change, we focus on the roles of public opinion, party competition, and parties’ traditional policy preferences in shaping parties’ climate policy preferences in Denmark and Ireland. In case studies that draw on in-depth interviews with policy prac…
Political parties and climate policy: A new approach to measuring parties’ climate policy preferences
This study presents an innovative approach to hand-coding parties’ policy preferences in the relatively new, cross-sectoral field of climate change mitigation policy. It applies this approach to party manifestos in six countries, comparing the preferences of parties in Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy and the United Kingdom over the past two decades. It probes the data for evidence of validity through content validation and convergent/dis…
Organizing Political Parties: Representation, Participation, and Power
This book uses the newly collected Political Party Database to investigate how political parties organize in contemporary parliamentary democracies. It develops new approaches and new measures for testing mid-level theories about the origins and impacts of parties’ organizational differences. Chapters in the first section catalogue cross-party differences in areas such as financial and staffing resources, party relations with societal groups, and…
Football, Place, and Community in a New Zealand Mining Town, 1877–1939
Resource towns (such as lumber camps, power plants, and mining towns) are by their very nature peripheral. They frequently exist in a space of isolation, not only geographically but also culturally as well. The South Island mining town of Kaitangata is a classic example of this process – an industrial, working class, and heavily migrant community positioned within an otherwise agricultural, conservation, and homogenous tract of rural New Zealand.…
The politics of climate change in Ireland: Symposium Introduction
The domestic arena has never been so important for the politics of climate change. The 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change established a global framework that emphasises ‘nationally determined’ responses to climate change. This places national policies – and the political and institutional factors that help or hinder those responses – front and centre. In the comparative study of climate politics, Ireland is not just another understudied case.…
The Irish general election of February 2016: Towards a New Politics or an Early Election
The general election that followed the ‘earthquake’ of 25 February 2011 (Gallagher and Marsh 2011; Hutcheson 2011; Little 2011) was always going to be an important staging post on the journey from the Fianna Fáil party’s predominance towards some new dispensation. That election took place five years and one day later. It delivered the most fragmented Dáil (lower house of parliament) ever and was followed by Ireland’s longest government formation …
Intra-party policy entrepreneurship and party goals: The case of political parties’ climate policy preferences in Ireland
This study contributes to the growing literature on the domestic politics of climate change by examining the climate policy preferences of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Labour Party over 20 years. Bringing the concept of ‘policy entrepreneurship’ into the study of intra-party politics, it uses secondary data, party documents, publicly available information and a series of in-depth interviews to develop an understanding of intra-party policy entr…
Portrait of a laggard? Environmental politics and the Irish general election of February 2016
The Irish general election of 26 February 2016 took place in the context of a recovering economy. Although the salience of environmental issues remained low, the election had important environmenta
Environmental politics in the 2015 Danish general election
Thomas Meyer, Constraints on party policy change, reviewed by Conor Little
Ministerial Importance and Survival in Government: Tough at the Top
Are holders of important ministerial positions more likely to survive in cabinet than their colleagues who hold less important positions? This study examines the relationship between the importance of a ministerial position and the length of time ministers are able to survive in government. It is based on an original dataset of cabinet ministers in seven West European countries from 1945 to 2011. Employing a little-used measure of ministerial sur…
Implementing Democratic Equality in Political Parties: Organisational Consequences in theSwedish and theGerman Pirate Parties
This article theorises and empirically assesses some important intra‐organisational implications of maximising democratic equality in political parties both between followers and members and between members and elites. They include weak member commitment, passivity of the rank‐and‐file membership and – depending on party structure – high levels of internal conflict. To substantiate the arguments, two parties that implement principles of democrati…
Gender, Class and Sporting Opportunity: Working-Class Women and Sport in Early Twentieth-Century Australia
This paper addresses a major blind spot in the history of Australian sport by investigating women's participation in sport with relation to social class. This is a question that has been largely overlooked in the current literature on the history of women's sport, but stands out as an issue deserving of further attention. The paper considers whether the obstacles faced by Australian sportswomen have been irrespective of social class and status, o…
Political parties and climate policy: A new approach to measuring parties’ climate policy preferences
This study presents an innovative approach to hand-coding parties’ policy preferences in the relatively new, cross-sectoral field of climate change mitigation policy. It applies this approach to party manifestos in six countries, comparing the preferences of parties in Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy and the United Kingdom over the past two decades. It probes the data for evidence of validity through content validation and convergent/dis…
Party competition on climate policy: The roles of interest groups, ideology and challenger parties in the UK and Ireland
This study shows how interest group–party relations, parties’ cross-cutting policy preferences, and competition with challenger parties shape the structure of issue competition on climate policy. It uses the ‘most similar’ cases of the UK and Ireland to show how differences in party systems influence the structure of issue competition. The study takes up the challenge of integrating salience and position in the conceptualisation of climate policy…
Ministerial Importance and Survival in Government: Tough at the Top
Are holders of important ministerial positions more likely to survive in cabinet than their colleagues who hold less important positions? This study examines the relationship between the importance of a ministerial position and the length of time ministers are able to survive in government. It is based on an original dataset of cabinet ministers in seven West European countries from 1945 to 2011. Employing a little-used measure of ministerial sur…
Implementing Democratic Equality in Political Parties: Organisational Consequences in theSwedish and theGerman Pirate Parties
This article theorises and empirically assesses some important intra‐organisational implications of maximising democratic equality in political parties both between followers and members and between members and elites. They include weak member commitment, passivity of the rank‐and‐file membership and – depending on party structure – high levels of internal conflict. To substantiate the arguments, two parties that implement principles of democrati…
Drivers of political parties' climate policy preferences: Lessons from Denmark and Ireland
Political parties are important actors in domestic climate politics. What drives variation in parties’ climate policy preferences? To contribute to a growing literature on the party politics of climate change, we focus on the roles of public opinion, party competition, and parties’ traditional policy preferences in shaping parties’ climate policy preferences in Denmark and Ireland. In case studies that draw on in-depth interviews with policy prac…
The General Election of 2011 in the Republic of Ireland: All Changed Utterly
A review of the Irish General Election of 2011
Change gradually, then all at once: The general election of February 2020 in the Republic of Ireland
At the general election of February 2020, Sinn Féin won a plurality of the vote in the Republic of Ireland for the first time. The party system remained highly fragmented and, with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael refusing to enter government with Sinn Féin, government formation took a record 20 weeks. Those 20 weeks coincided with the emergence of the Covid-19 public health emergency in Europe. A minority caretaker government introduced significant pol…
Intra-party policy entrepreneurship and party goals: The case of political parties’ climate policy preferences in Ireland
This study contributes to the growing literature on the domestic politics of climate change by examining the climate policy preferences of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Labour Party over 20 years. Bringing the concept of ‘policy entrepreneurship’ into the study of intra-party politics, it uses secondary data, party documents, publicly available information and a series of in-depth interviews to develop an understanding of intra-party policy entr…
The Irish general election of February 2016: Towards a New Politics or an Early Election
The general election that followed the ‘earthquake’ of 25 February 2011 (Gallagher and Marsh 2011; Hutcheson 2011; Little 2011) was always going to be an important staging post on the journey from the Fianna Fáil party’s predominance towards some new dispensation. That election took place five years and one day later. It delivered the most fragmented Dáil (lower house of parliament) ever and was followed by Ireland’s longest government formation …
Party organisation and the party-delegate style of representation
Politicians perceive their representative role in a variety of ways: as a delegate of their party, a delegate of voters, or a trustee who exercises their mandate independent of any external principal. Existing research finds that the tendency to adopt a specific style of representation depends on system-level institutions and individuals’ political experience and profile. The influence of the party organisational context remains little understood…
The issue content of party politics in Ireland: A new perspective on the Irish party system and its development
The Irish party system has been exceptional both for the weakness of its left-right conflict and for its long-run stability. How then can party competition on policy, and particularly competition between the main parties, be characterised? This study examines the Irish party system from an issue competition perspective, examining the party system agenda and asking whether Irish party competition is marked by differences in issue focus. New data f…
Without enemies, without friends. Morality policies, the Roman Catholic Church, and Ireland’s ‘secular’ party system
The ‘two worlds of morality politics’ framework suggests that the historical structure of the party system has a major influence on the politics of morality issues. This study uses the case of Ireland to examine that proposition. Ireland is unusual in that it combines the absence of an historical church-state conflict in its party system with an historically strong Roman Catholic Church. It is therefore a ‘critical case’ for the ‘two worlds’ fram…
The politics of climate change in Ireland: Symposium Introduction
The domestic arena has never been so important for the politics of climate change. The 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change established a global framework that emphasises ‘nationally determined’ responses to climate change. This places national policies – and the political and institutional factors that help or hinder those responses – front and centre. In the comparative study of climate politics, Ireland is not just another understudied case.…
Understanding the Conflict of Conflicts: Is Left-Right Conflict a Necessary Condition for the Development of New Politics
One of the most significant changes in West European politics in the past 40 years is the emergence of the new cultural divide. However, there is substantial variation in how the issues comprising this new divide have manifested themselves in party systems. This raises the question of what mechanisms bring these issues into established party systems. The literature has so far focused on new political parties and critical junctures. This article a…
Portrait of a laggard? Environmental politics and the Irish general election of February 2016
The Irish general election of 26 February 2016 took place in the context of a recovering economy. Although the salience of environmental issues remained low, the election had important environmenta
Environmental politics in the 2015 Danish general election
Climate politics in small European states
Gender, Class and Sporting Opportunity: Working-Class Women and Sport in Early Twentieth-Century Australia
This paper addresses a major blind spot in the history of Australian sport by investigating women's participation in sport with relation to social class. This is a question that has been largely overlooked in the current literature on the history of women's sport, but stands out as an issue deserving of further attention. The paper considers whether the obstacles faced by Australian sportswomen have been irrespective of social class and status, o…
The legislative agenda in Ireland, 1922–2021
This article analyses the legislative agenda in Ireland since 1922 using new data coded within the Comparative Agendas Project framework. The data, generated using the codebook of the Irish Policy Agendas Project (http://irishpolicyagendas.eu/), show clear evidence of long-term changes in the complexity, issue focus, and Europeanisation of the legislative agenda in Ireland. The study uses the Irish case to test some existing arguments concerning …
The Mighty Bears: A Social History of North Sydney Rugby League
The Forgotten Game? A Reassessment of the Place of Soccer within New Zealand Society, Sport and Historiography
Soccer is widely perceived as having occupied a largely peripheral position within New Zealand sport and culture. Such a view has also been perpetuated by most of the existing literature, both popular and academic, on New Zealand sports history. This article critically challenges this interpretation and argues the need to reassess soccer's place within New Zealand history and society. Most significantly, new evidence is presented that indicates s…
The ‘Hidden’ History of the Birth of Rugby League in Australia: The Significance of ‘Local’ Factors in Sydney's Rugby Split
Although the birth of rugby league in Australia has been addressed in a number of works by a number of historians, dating back to the first ‘Sporting Traditions’ conference in Australia in 1977. It is the intention of this paper to argue that there are still some aspects of the ‘split’ that have remained hidden, and perhaps neglected, by these existing studies. Most importantly, it will be argued that the causes of many players (and some clubs) d…
The General Election of 2011 in the Republic of Ireland: All Changed Utterly
A review of the Irish General Election of 2011
Hamlet without the Prince’: Understanding Singapore–Malaysian relations through football
In January 2012, a Singaporean football team returned to the Malaysian Super League for the first time in 17 years. Those years of exile (caused by the Football Association of Singapore’s withdrawal from Malaysian football in 1995) were the most recent manifestation of the long-standing sporting and political tensions across the Causeway. Since Singapore’s expulsion from Malaysia in 1965, the two neighbours have had a tumultuous relationship, mar…
Gender, Class and Sporting Opportunity: Working-Class Women and Sport in Early Twentieth-Century Australia
This paper addresses a major blind spot in the history of Australian sport by investigating women's participation in sport with relation to social class. This is a question that has been largely overlooked in the current literature on the history of women's sport, but stands out as an issue deserving of further attention. The paper considers whether the obstacles faced by Australian sportswomen have been irrespective of social class and status, o…
Thomas Meyer, Constraints on party policy change, reviewed by Conor Little
Ministerial Importance and Survival in Government: Tough at the Top
Are holders of important ministerial positions more likely to survive in cabinet than their colleagues who hold less important positions? This study examines the relationship between the importance of a ministerial position and the length of time ministers are able to survive in government. It is based on an original dataset of cabinet ministers in seven West European countries from 1945 to 2011. Employing a little-used measure of ministerial sur…
Implementing Democratic Equality in Political Parties: Organisational Consequences in theSwedish and theGerman Pirate Parties
This article theorises and empirically assesses some important intra‐organisational implications of maximising democratic equality in political parties both between followers and members and between members and elites. They include weak member commitment, passivity of the rank‐and‐file membership and – depending on party structure – high levels of internal conflict. To substantiate the arguments, two parties that implement principles of democrati…
Environmental politics in the 2015 Danish general election
Organizing Political Parties: Representation, Participation, and Power
This book uses the newly collected Political Party Database to investigate how political parties organize in contemporary parliamentary democracies. It develops new approaches and new measures for testing mid-level theories about the origins and impacts of parties’ organizational differences. Chapters in the first section catalogue cross-party differences in areas such as financial and staffing resources, party relations with societal groups, and…
Football, Place, and Community in a New Zealand Mining Town, 1877–1939
Resource towns (such as lumber camps, power plants, and mining towns) are by their very nature peripheral. They frequently exist in a space of isolation, not only geographically but also culturally as well. The South Island mining town of Kaitangata is a classic example of this process – an industrial, working class, and heavily migrant community positioned within an otherwise agricultural, conservation, and homogenous tract of rural New Zealand.…
The politics of climate change in Ireland: Symposium Introduction
The domestic arena has never been so important for the politics of climate change. The 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change established a global framework that emphasises ‘nationally determined’ responses to climate change. This places national policies – and the political and institutional factors that help or hinder those responses – front and centre. In the comparative study of climate politics, Ireland is not just another understudied case.…
The Irish general election of February 2016: Towards a New Politics or an Early Election
The general election that followed the ‘earthquake’ of 25 February 2011 (Gallagher and Marsh 2011; Hutcheson 2011; Little 2011) was always going to be an important staging post on the journey from the Fianna Fáil party’s predominance towards some new dispensation. That election took place five years and one day later. It delivered the most fragmented Dáil (lower house of parliament) ever and was followed by Ireland’s longest government formation …
Intra-party policy entrepreneurship and party goals: The case of political parties’ climate policy preferences in Ireland
This study contributes to the growing literature on the domestic politics of climate change by examining the climate policy preferences of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Labour Party over 20 years. Bringing the concept of ‘policy entrepreneurship’ into the study of intra-party politics, it uses secondary data, party documents, publicly available information and a series of in-depth interviews to develop an understanding of intra-party policy entr…
Portrait of a laggard? Environmental politics and the Irish general election of February 2016
The Irish general election of 26 February 2016 took place in the context of a recovering economy. Although the salience of environmental issues remained low, the election had important environmenta
Political parties and climate policy: A new approach to measuring parties’ climate policy preferences
This study presents an innovative approach to hand-coding parties’ policy preferences in the relatively new, cross-sectoral field of climate change mitigation policy. It applies this approach to party manifestos in six countries, comparing the preferences of parties in Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy and the United Kingdom over the past two decades. It probes the data for evidence of validity through content validation and convergent/dis…
Climate politics in small European states
Drivers of political parties' climate policy preferences: Lessons from Denmark and Ireland
Political parties are important actors in domestic climate politics. What drives variation in parties’ climate policy preferences? To contribute to a growing literature on the party politics of climate change, we focus on the roles of public opinion, party competition, and parties’ traditional policy preferences in shaping parties’ climate policy preferences in Denmark and Ireland. In case studies that draw on in-depth interviews with policy prac…
Without enemies, without friends. Morality policies, the Roman Catholic Church, and Ireland’s ‘secular’ party system
The ‘two worlds of morality politics’ framework suggests that the historical structure of the party system has a major influence on the politics of morality issues. This study uses the case of Ireland to examine that proposition. Ireland is unusual in that it combines the absence of an historical church-state conflict in its party system with an historically strong Roman Catholic Church. It is therefore a ‘critical case’ for the ‘two worlds’ fram…
The Party System: At a Critical Juncture
This chapter focuses on the attributes and development of the Irish party system, describing its structure and where it sits in comparative perspective. As well as examining party size and ideology, the chapter applies Peter Mair’s conceptualization of the party system as the structure of competition for control of the executive to the Irish case. In doing so, it explores the relationship between electoral change and party system change, arguing …
Change gradually, then all at once: The general election of February 2020 in the Republic of Ireland
At the general election of February 2020, Sinn Féin won a plurality of the vote in the Republic of Ireland for the first time. The party system remained highly fragmented and, with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael refusing to enter government with Sinn Féin, government formation took a record 20 weeks. Those 20 weeks coincided with the emergence of the Covid-19 public health emergency in Europe. A minority caretaker government introduced significant pol…
Party competition on climate policy: The roles of interest groups, ideology and challenger parties in the UK and Ireland
This study shows how interest group–party relations, parties’ cross-cutting policy preferences, and competition with challenger parties shape the structure of issue competition on climate policy. It uses the ‘most similar’ cases of the UK and Ireland to show how differences in party systems influence the structure of issue competition. The study takes up the challenge of integrating salience and position in the conceptualisation of climate policy…
The legislative agenda in Ireland, 1922–2021
This article analyses the legislative agenda in Ireland since 1922 using new data coded within the Comparative Agendas Project framework. The data, generated using the codebook of the Irish Policy Agendas Project (http://irishpolicyagendas.eu/), show clear evidence of long-term changes in the complexity, issue focus, and Europeanisation of the legislative agenda in Ireland. The study uses the Irish case to test some existing arguments concerning …
Symposium introduction: The politics of public policy in Ireland
Political science (28 works) · Law (27 works) · Politics (24 works) · Political economy (18 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Law (16 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (13 works) · Irish and British Studies (10 works) · Economics (9 works) · Public Administration (9 works)