In this thesis I use original empirical data to examine the impact of the political experience of MPs before they enter parliament on their careers once inside the House of Commons. The contribution I make to knowledge is twofold. First, I build on existing literature in the field by developing a stand-alone classification of pre-parliamentary political experience that distinguishes between experience gained on the local level, for example as a local councillor, and experience gained on the national level, working for an MP or in the head office of a political party. Second, I empirically operationalise this classification and support it adopting quantitative research techniques. Using a cohort study of those MPs first elected at the 1997 general election, I find that those MPs with national-level pre-parliamentary political experience are more likely to reach cabinet-level frontbench positions while MPs with local-level experience are more likely to remain backbenchers or reach only the lower levels of government. I highlight the ways in which national-level pre-parliamentary political experience interacts with other political and personal factors to provide a small group of MPs with a preferential parliamentary career path relative to their colleagues. I conclude by placing my findings in the context of comparative research on political parties, reflecting that certain types of party structure privilege specific types of pre-parliamentary political experience. I also consider the findings in light of debates on political representation and professionalisation, and highlight directions for future research in this area.

Ozawa Ichiro is presented as a policy entrepreneur in the Kingdonian sense, dedicated to turning Japan into what he calls "a normal nation". In so doing, he is attacking Japanese exceptionalism - the idea that the Japanese are somehow unique. The thesis takes the form of a political biography based on three hypotheses: that Ozawa's ideas were distinctive; that he was a policy entrepreneur; and that he had an impact on political change. The time frame covers 18 years, beginning with Ozawa appointment as LDP Secretary General in 1989, and ending with the upper house election of 2007, in which Ozawa for the first time achieved his goal of victory in an election by an opposition party strong enough to compete with the long-ruling LDP.

This thesis is a study of the political career of Charles Owen O'Conor from 1860 to 1906. More commonly known as the O'Conor Don, he was a leading Catholic landlord and Whig-Liberal politician of his time whose significance in Irish and British political life has been overlooked. It is therefore the aim of this thesis to examine the O'Conor Don's career in the contexts of Catholic Whig-Liberal and unionist politics in Ireland and Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century. A wide range of manuscript and printed primary sources are drawn upon in this thesis, but principal among them is the O'Conor papers, an extensive and hitherto largely unused private archive. The thesis is organised into six thematic chapters. Chapter one provides the historical background for the O'Conor Don's Whig-Liberal outlook by charting the fortunes of his family from the mid-seventeenth century right up to his election as M.P. for County Roscommon in 1860. Chapter two examines the social and economic aspects of the O'Conor Don's role as a landlord while chapter three follows with a discussion of how these factors, together with the ideology of political economy and various political considerations, influenced his thinking on land reform between 1860 and 1903. Chapter four considers the 0' Conor Don' s role in the Irish university question with a view to emphasising the influence of elite lay Catholic opinion on educational reform between 1860 and 1880. Chapter five examines the O'Conor Don's Whig views on self-government in the contexts of liberal politics in Ireland and Britain, and the rise of the home rule movement between 1860 and 1880. Finally, chapter six continues with this theme for the period between 1880 and 1900, but with the added emphasis on the O'Conor Don's place within the wider unionist opposition to home rule.

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The traditionalist historiography of nineteenth-century Mexico produced a simplistic binary view of the period in which politics were characterised by a clear-cut liberal/conservative divide. According to this interpretation, the liberals were repeatedly depicted as the patriotic forefathers of the great reformist liberals of the mid-century Reforma period, whilst the conservatives were presented as the treacherous defenders of the dark forces of reaction. A revaluation of the fragmented politics of Mexican liberalism during the critical decade of the 1840s, focussing in particular on the actions and ideas of moderate political thinker and actor, Mariano Otero, provides a much needed nuanced understanding of the political issues, factions, and tendencies of the time. It highlights for one, the nature of the divisions that prevented Mexican liberals from presenting a united front, even during the traumatic Mexican-American War (1846-48). It also forces us to revise the view that there were only two political factions or worldviews during this period. This thesis examines, therefore, Mexican moderate liberalism in the 1840s through the figure of Mariano Otero (Mexico, 1817-1850), never quite fully researched in the historiography. A moderate liberal ideologue, politician, lawyer and essayist, he was politically active during the turbulent decade from 1841 until his death in 1850. He served as congressional deputy in 1842 and 1846, senator from 1847-1849, and government minister in 1848. Author of the seminal Ensayo sobre el verdadero estado de la cuestión social y política que se agita en la República Mexicana (1842), and architect of the 1846 Acta de Reformas that reformed the 1824 constitution, he is lauded as the father of the Juicio de Amparo a legal recourse which provided the individual with a means of protection from the abuses of the state. This thesis thus approaches the subject by offering an in-depth biographical study of Otero and an analysis of the political ideology that informed his writings and actions. By contrasting Otero's political ideas with those others that were in vogue and showing how these were, in turn, put into effect, bearing in mind a backcloth of political and military alliances that was constantly changing, the aim of this study is to allow the reader to understand the nature of Otero's political standpoint as well as that of Mexico's mid-century moderados in context. The Otero that emerges from this revision is a man of firm convictions, a committed constitutionalist, unwavering in his belief in federalism as the answer to Mexico's ills but forced to compromise to achieve his aims. This was a man who in attempting to shape the time was himself shaped by it. Certainly no such cut and dried portrait as that previously portrayed emerges.

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