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Greetings Ireland,

We at Saoirese would like to thank everyone who participated on our policy survey a last week. As you may remember, this is the second installment in a series of surveys that are intended to help make Saoirse more responsive to Irish voters. The first survey looked at the personal traits that Irish citizens thought were the most important to consider when assigning priority to congressional candidates. This current survey deals with the specific policy views of Irish citizens. It is our hope that the results of this survey will help guide the decisions of our party members in leadership positions, and also be of use to other parties as well.

Just as in the first survey, we were very pleased to receive such a high response rate (37 responses from 7 different parties). Judging by the last turnout for congressional elections (around 200 citizens), almost 20% of the active population participated. We also got some interesting results from the data. For example, we found that the greatest dissatisfaction with current policy seems to lie in the domain of domestic affairs rather than economic or even foreign affairs. Specifically, there was a surprisingly strong demand for reform in domestic issues such as immigration policy. Maintenance of the status quo seemed to be the order of the day for other issue domains. A full analysis of the results of the study and its implications are summarized and discussed below. In addition, I also offer some preliminary insights of my own onto possible avenues for immigration reform.





RAFFLE RESULTS:

First things first. Congratulations to the three winners of the Gold drawing! Winners were determined by assigning each survey-taker a number between 1 and 37 based on the order they took the survey, and then generating a random number via the random number generator at http://www.random.org/. Survey-takers that did not hold Irish citizenship or who were members of the Saoirse executive council were not eligible for the prizes.




3 Gol😛 anteaa (Saoirse)
1 Gol😛 Lexone (Saoirse)
1 Gol😛 CaseyQ (IFP)




Now onto the nuts-and-bolts of the report. The survey asked a number of policy questions across three broad issue domains: foreign policy, economic policy, and domestic policy. We will begin first with foreign policy, which included the largest number of issues and then move onto economic and then domestic issues. A full graphical summary of the data can be found here.




FOREIGN POLICY



In terms of our alliance status, the majority of Irish citizens (79😵 preferred to remain a full member of EDEN for now, although most of those respondents (62😵 were not enthusiastic about it and thought we should also continue to keep our options open. Only 32% of respondents thought independence (not being a part of any large alliance) is the best option for Ireland, and there was zero support for strict neutrality. Moreover, when given a choice between alliance organization, 70% favored EDEN over other organizations such as CoT (see graphic below for breakdown).





It should be noted, however, that the majority of citizens (59😵 believe that the goals of that membership should be to assist in defense of our allies’ home regions only rather than to help them to expand, even if it is for the glory of the alliance. Moreover, there was no clear consensus on whether or not Ireland should put its responsibilities to its friends and allies above its own ambitions, with most people agreeing somewhat but more people strongly disagreeing than strongly agreeing (see graphic below).





The 10 countries that Irish citizens tend to feel most favorably towards are:

1. USA (19 votes)
2. Canada (13 votes)
3. Croatia (13 votes)
4. Bulgaria (8 votes)
5. Greece (8 votes)
6. Portugal (8 votes)
7. China (5 votes)
8. Russia (5 votes)
9. United Kingdom (5 votes)
10. France (5 votes)

The 10 countries that Irish citizens love to hate are:

1. Poland (21 votes)
2. Serbia (18 votes)
3. Turkey (15 votes)
4. United Kingdom (15 votes)
5. Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) (10 votes)
6. Spain (6 votes)
7. Argentina (5 votes)
8. Hungary (5 votes)
9. Israel (5 votes)
10. Slovenia (5 votes)

I was personally surprised to see the USA so overwhelmingly favored by the Irish, although it makes sense when one considers that many of us are from the USA IRL (such as myself). What made me laugh was that the United Kingdom was both on the most favored and most hated lists. Apparently it is a country that we both love and despise at the same time, although overall there appeared to be more hate than love. One regret I have about this survey is not asking more questions about our most important neighbor, such as acceptance of the current peace treaty, desire for war or even with willingness of Irish citizens to accept a military alliance with the United Kingdom if the circumstances were right. Because of this, another survey might eventually be released that is wholly dedicated to mapping our complicated feelings and policy attitudes toward the UK.

We did, however, gauge general policy attitudes toward our immediate neighbors in this survey. Unsurprisingly, public opinion on this issue turned out to be mixed. 51% felt Ireland should either be less aggressive or indifferent and focusing on global issues, but an unignorable 49% thought we should be more aggressive. However, there seemed to be general acceptance of the necessity the current “treaty” with Poland (73😵, with only 27% strongly opposed. Apparently not getting wiped is more important than our pride at this particular moment in time.





ECONOMIC POLICY




Overall, responses to economic policy questions were rather uninteresting. Most people either trusted the government to make the right decision about tax rates or thought that the current tax rates and minimum wages should remain unchanged across the board. Below is a breakdown of economic policy attitudes. I thought it was a little funny that some people wanted certain categories to be “decreased” even though they were already at their lowest possible level. This probably reflects the fact that most people don’t care enough about tax policy to hold a well-informed opinion. Free comments in the economic policy section added legitimacy to this hypothesis.





The one thing I will note about economic policy attitudes is that there does seem to be some moderate interest for increasing income taxes and increasing the minimum wage. This demand was not as prominent for import or value-added taxes, which had almost equal support for a general decrease.





DOMESTIC POLIY



In the area of domestic policy, the one thing that stood out the most was an overwhelming demand for immigration reform. A near-unanimous 84% of the respondents in this survey said that Ireland needs to be more strict in who we give citizenship passes to, and that the government should establish an official vetting process with punitive sanctions against congress members who disobey. In other words, the current system of “do whatever you want” is simply not working for us. However, before we all go blaming the current government for not caring about immigration, it is important to keep in mind that immigration oversight is a difficult feat to pull off in a game like this where the government has no real method of punitive sanctions (at least in-game) against congress members who disobey. We all know that governments who tried to interfere with immigration decisions in the past have simply been laughed at by congress members who feel it is their Admin-given right to give citizenship to anybody they please.





At the same time, however, it is clear from this survey that Irish citizens are fed up with the lack of accountability and oversight in immigration policy. It is my personal opinion, therefore, that political parties should take it upon themselves to implement immigration reform. Political parties pare particularly well-suited to deal with immigration oversight because, after the most recent reforms by the admins, party presidents now have the ability to assign priorities to congressional candidates in each election. Refusing to give priority to congress members who skirt immigration policy may therefore be a very effective mechanism of sanction. How exactly parties determine which citizen requests are acceptable and which are not (e.g. appointing their own immigration officer vs. deferring to the judgment of the government vs. working with other parties to form an interparty immigration committee) remains to be seen. But in any case it is my opinion that party presidents must be central to any immigration reform in the future, and that they may even have the potential to exert their newfound influence on other issues as well (i.e. congressional debating and voting procedures). If so, this could work to make congress a stronger and more effective institution Ireland. Please note, however, that this is only my personal opinion and not necessarily the official position of Saoirse (yet). The leadership council will be discussing this and other potential reforms in a party meeting this weekend. Therefore comments and discussion regarding immigration reform are highly encouraged.

Policy toward military units (MUs) was another domestic issue that people seemed to have strong feelings about. In this survey, only 30% of respondents agreed that the government should provide supplies exclusively to members of the national MU. The majority (46😵 supported the idea of the government supplying anybody who asks for supplies as long as they follow government battle orders for those supplies (what we have traditionally been doing), and an additional 24% thought that the government should supply all Irish citizens regardless of what they plan to do with those supplies.

Regardless of government supplies, the commune system in general also seemed to have high support among survey respondents. 62% said that communes help Ireland’s economy or ability to fight, whereas only 8% of respondents believe that communes hurt our economy or ability to fight.

Note: No questions in this survey was asked about the current looting crisis. It was just assumed that people are unanimously against looting and overwhelmingly in favor of reforms that will make government orgs more secure. However, these issues still could have been reflected in the data about trust in government regarding domestic issues (below).





TRUST IN GOVERNMENT

Finally, this survey asked questions about people’s attitude strength toward the three different broad policy domains, as well as how much they trusted the government to make the right decisions in each domain. The results, below, show that there is moderate trust in the government to make the right decisions across the board, but that people trust the government more with economic policy than with foreign or domestic policy. The inverse is true with opinion strength, with people having the strongest opinions about domestic policy and the weakest opinions about economic policy.








INTERPRETATION ISSUES

It is important to note that the interpretation found in this article was based on broad overviews and impressions of the data rather than actual statistical hypothesis testing. Thus any given differences between responses may not necessarily be statistically significant. Moreover, just as in the last survey there was some significant party-based selection bias with Saoirse members being somewhat overrepresented compared to other parties. Overall, however, Saoirse members comprised only 41% of the total, meaning that the majority of respondents were from a variety of other parties or not affiliated with a party.



Other details about respondent makeup, including things such as in-game activity levels, can be found here.





THANK YOU FOR READING!

We hope this information was as helpful to you as it was to us.

If you missed your chance to win gold, do not worry! We will be collecting data for the next survey soon. The next survey will focus on the specific roles and responsibilities of the various branches of government, as well as military units and political parties. If anybody wants to me to include any questions of their own in that survey, just shoot me (Stilpo) a PM.


Regards,

The Saoirse Leadership Council
For a Stronger Eire - Together!


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