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South Australia's two big political parties - particularly the Liberals - are famous for long and bitter internal divisions.

But echoes from further afield - specifically the federal ALP's fraught Rudd-Gillard-Rudd period - can hardly be avoided if Labor loses its 12-year grasp on governing the state at Saturday night's election, as widely expected.

Parallels could include a successful leader pushed out by factional heavies and a governing party caught flatfooted by a new Opposition Leader

Not so fast, cautions Associate Professor of Politics at Flinders University, Haydon Manning.

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A more salient cause of South Australians' disenchantment with the Labor Government of Premier Jay Weatherill, Professor Manning says, is their fear of an economy in decline and the return of the spectre of a ''rust-belt'' state.

The Liberal Party, having chosen a previously unknown Steven Marshall as leader, free of the party's decades-old leadership merry-go-round, had managed to harness voters' disenchantment through an emphasis on Labor's $1 billion deficit and the loss of its hard-won AAA credit rating.

The biggest blow to confidence had been BHP Billiton's decision in August 2012 to postpone indefinitely its planned $30 billion expansion of South Australia's Olympic Dam mine. Less than 12 months previously, former premier Mike Rann had touted the mine expansion as his crowning achievement, and there had been a sense the state could continue to afford to build debt, knowing it could be paid off.

Now, with Rann and the mine expansion gone, there had grown ''a sense of hopes and aspirations dashed'', Professor Manning said. Holden's recent announcement it was quitting car manufacturing had deepened the gloom.

Weatherill, in his first term as leader after Rann was pushed from office by union-backed factional leaders in late 2011, has lacked Rann's touch in building a narrative of hope.

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Analysis: Disenchanted SA voters driven by fears of economy in decline