According to polling, most people planning to cast a first preference vote for the UUP in May’s Assembly election will switch their vote to nationalists before they provide a transfer to other unionist parties.
Our second big question is whether Protestant and Catholic voters in 2016 had distinctive preferences. Table 5 shows that distinctiveness in respect of first preferences. The three panels in this table correspond to the three major party ‘blocs’ that dominate Northern Irish politics: unionists in the top panel, nationalists in the bottom panel, and ‘others’ in the middle. As the first column shows, Protestants continue overwhelmingly to give first preferences to unionist parties, with only 2 per cent giving first preferences to nationalist parties. This is reciprocated on the Catholic side, where support for the two main nationalist parties is equally overwhelming, with only 4 per cent giving a first preference to one of the unionist parties. About a fifth of both Catholics and Protestants give their first preference to the political centre^. [...] At the surface level of first preference voting, Protestants continue overwhelmingly to support unionist parties, with only 2 per cent giving first preferences to nationalist parties. This is mirrored on the Catholic side, with only 4 per cent giving a first preference to one of the unionist parties. [...] The 2016 Assembly election in Northern Ireland offers, then, further evidence of the highly polarised structuring of party support in that deeply divided region. Protestant and Catholic voters tend not just to give their first preference votes to nationalist and unionist parties respectively (with some exceptions just mentioned); they also tend to continue these preferences within their own political bloc rather than transferring to the rival bloc.