Research On The New Zealand Labour Party

The New Zealand Labour Party(NZLP)has a history of one hundred years since it was founded in 1916.As the oldest existing political party in New Zealand,NZLP not only plays a mainstay role in New Zealand politics,but also proves to be an indispensable part of New Zealand political party structure.Although previous literature objectively introduced NZLP from the historical perspective,they ignored the interactive effects among the different participants during the development of the Labour Party.The literature also targeted to the Labour Party from policy analysis and comparative political perspective,but they ignored the intrinsic relationship between different factors and subjects.Based on the above thinking,this paper attempts to combine NZLP with the development of New Zealand and the workers 'movement of New Zealand.On the other hand,based on constitution,policy and ideology of the Labour Party,we innovatively review the development of NZLP in the past century,both statically and dynamically.The study of NZLP is divided into three parts:first,from the angle of Party Constitution and Party Program,this paper systematically combs its organization structure and system,and summarizes its structural and institutional characteristics.We found that NZLP has a flat organizational structure and fine institutional system rules.Secondly,based on the development of New Zealand and the process of workers'movement,this paper streamlines the 100-year relationship between NZLP and New Zealand Trade Union(NZTU).It is concluded that it experienced from NZTU dominance to NZLP dominance and lastly to a partnership after restructure and transformation.Thirdly,from the party policy bias in NZLP,this paper not only combs the Party's guiding principle evolution in details,but also summarizes the ideology changes carried out by NZLP.It primarily completed the evolution from social democracy to democratic socialism,which promoted the governance capability of the Labour Party and its supporting forces becomes diversified.With the continuously gaining strengthen of the Conservative Party and the fading democratic socialism,NZLP started to fail consecutively in the country's political arena.Under internal and external failure,over the past 20 years,NZLP has explored a "third way" different from the traditional democratic socialism and the neo-liberalism,which successfully made NZLP to rise again with fruitful governance achievements.