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The Labour Party is New Zealand’s oldest continuous political Party. Steeped in Social Democratic tradition the Party underwent major conflicts as three major factions emerged between 1978 and 1990. Using Frank Baumgartner’s Conflict and Rhetoric in French Policy Making (1989), this thesis investigates why the three factions inside the Labour Party during this period used conflict in order gain influence over the Labour Party and its political and legislative agenda. What was to emerge was a party struggling to maintain unity as the factions began to tear apart the very framework that was the Labour Party. This was to ultimately have an effect on both articulation of Labour policy and the aggregation of support at the polls. Using interviews with various former and current members of the Labour Party this thesis sets out to piece together how the factions inside the party used conflict to their advantage in order to gain influence in a fragmenting party. The emergence of splinter parties in the 1990s on both the left and right of the Labour Party in particular ACT and the Alliance shows just how fractured and divided the party was during the tenure of the fourth Labour Government.

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The variation in expansion of national political parties into regional politics in Russia poses a fundamental challenge to theories of party development by presenting an empirical puzzle: why have national politics dominated in some regions yet failed to elect or even present candidates in others? Conventional explanations for party weakness in Russia invoke cultural constraints or poor institutional incentives but neither provide sufficient variation to explain these outcomes at the regional level. These failures correspond to a larger lacunae in the party literature on the process by parties become nationalized and eliminate their regional competitors. / This study addresses these empirical questions by re-examining regional elites and their ability to create informal alternatives to parties. I argue that the failure of national political party development in Russian regional politics is not simply the product of poor institutional incentives but rather due to the active opposition of regional elites. Where regional elites successfully mobilized the resources made available during transition, they prevented the entry of national parties by furnishing their own candidates with powerful financial resources and lending them reputation that resonated with the electorate. These outcomes were not predetermined by legacies of the Soviet era, however, but were rather contingent on the ability of regional executives to rapidly construct winning coalitions, particularly through the mobilization of administrative resources and the construction of patronage networks. Hence, the successful development national parties in regional politics was as much a story of weak regional regimes as it was a story of successful regional party branches.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington. / Vita. Bibliography: l. [347]-371.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (B.A.Hons. 1969) from the Dept. of History, University of Adelaide,1969.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Melbourne, Dept. of Political Science,Faculty of Arts, 2005. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 222-243).