The general election of 1943

Abstract

This thesis deals with the two most striking aspects of New Zealand's wartime politics; the effect of the war, and particularly the public pressure for political unity that it generated, on party politics and the growth between 1940 and 1943 of various new political movements. The election is obviously the focal point in developments on these subjects. By renewing the Labour Government's mandate it enabled the already dead question of political unity to be decently buried, and by eliminating the small parties it ensured an immediate return to the two-party system. Therefore the main interest in the 1943 election is not in its place in the development of electoral trends in the nineteen-thirties and forties, but in the culmination of political developments that were a direct result of the war.