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Research Project

Westminster Transplanted and Westminster Implanted: Explanations for Political Change (2002-2005)

Professor R. A. W. Rhodes, Professor J. Wanna and Professor Patrick Weller (Griffith University) received an Australian Research Council Discovery Award, totalling A$165,000. The grant ended in December 2005. We have a book contract with Oxford University Press.

The project explores why Westminster systems, which have been adopted across the world, have been so resilient in different environments? It explores how different nations adapted the Westminster core executive by combining local traditions with inherited practices. The project will identify what conditions provided stability and security. By comparing performance across nations, it will explain why Westminster practices were so adaptable. This study is the first longitudinal explanation of political development in societies that inherited executive practices from the same source.

Key Publications

‘The Westminster Model as Tradition: the case of Australia’. In H. Patapan, J. Wanna and P. Weller (Eds.), Westminster Legacies: democracy and responsible government in Asia, Australasia and the Pacific. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2005, pp. 129-52.