ABSTRACT
The Austrian political system has often been regarded as a “special case” among the family of Western European democracies because of its high degree of political stability. Traditional political ties eroded both in the sense of affective orientations and in terms of organizational affiliation. Electoral volatility spreading from younger voters and members of the new middle classes to former core voters of the traditional parties. The traditional party system of past-1945 Austria was built around three main cleavages: The cleavage between industrial labor and farming and enterprise, the cleavage between secular and Catholic-religious orientations, and the conflict between German and Austrian nationalism. Political accommodation in government and administration was significantly buttressed by the system of social and economic corporatism, in which the economic interest associations took part in policy-making in the fields of economics, welfare politics, and industrial relations.
