If we’re looking mainly at how the hunger strikes influenced Sinn Féin’s move toward electoralism, if the prison protest had been resolved after Sands was elected then it may have been a lot later before SF finally started standing candidates. In April 1981 it was people in the Anti H-Block/Armagh campaign like Bernadette McAliskey who pushed the idea of standing a candidate and it took a fair amount of work for them to convince Sinn Féin of it.
That by-election was a straight two-dog fight between Sands and the unionist candidate Harry West. It was seen by many as a giving Sands a borrowed vote so as to place an onus on all to resolve the protest before there were any deaths, so that election alone wouldn’t have had much influence on thinking within the Provisionals on the matter.
The June ’81 general election in the South took place a month after the deaths of Ray McCreesh and Patsy O’Hara and a month before the death of Joe McDonnell. The turn out for H-Block/Armagh candidates in this election was of course what convinced Sinn Féin that there was an electoral platform for them. Again, had the protest been resolved before the election took place then SF would still have probably ended up entering into elections, but at a much later point. The 1981 elections did give the Adams faction a huge boost against those who opposed entering into elections.
It’s also worth asking what may have become of the Anti H-Block/Armagh movement if the prison struggle had ended earlier than it did. The campaign was bigger than even the civil rights movement and many of its founders envisioned it as developing into a broad anti-imperialist movement. This was opposed by SF who did all they could to limit the focus of the campaign, and after October 1981 they picked over its carcass to build their own party machine, especially in the South. Stuart Ross’s book Smashing H-Block is well worth a read in this regard.
The biggest immediate impact of the hunger strikes was probably the ‘armalite and ballot box’ strategy, but it’s worth keeping in mind that it took 20 years and the dropping of the armalite part before SF found real electoral success and took over the SDLP in the North.