The expectation that voters behave rationally has been challenged through studies suggesting that “irrelevant events” like natural disasters and sports results change voting behavior. We test the effect of irrelevant events by matching candidate-level election results from Irish general (1922–2020) and local elections (1942–2019) with games in the men's Gaelic football and hurling championships, the most popular sports in Ireland. Although Irish citizens care deeply about sports, we fail to find any relationship between match results and support for incumbents or politicians of government parties. These findings hold when applying an “unexpected event during survey design” to two representative surveys. Our results contribute to the literature on political accountability and point to conditional effects of irrelevant events.
Transparency in public institutions is relevant only in so far as the disclosed information is useful for the stakeholders who access it. Hence, we ask: what do users do with the information they obtain through transparency laws? Despite the growing interest in transparency research, the ways transparency portals are used to gather information remain strikingly understudied. We study the use of proactively and reactively disclosed information under four different transparency laws. Data are collected in the Republic of Ireland through a survey of what is generally considered to be the main category of users, benefiters, and guardians of transparency, namely journalists. This is one of the first surveys of the media's use of resources intended to ensure greater transparency in politics and offers a standard approach to the study of open government as a means to improve democratic governance.
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