ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that parties and the party system in Austria changed considerably over the post-war years and particularly since the 1980s. Austrian political parties have long been recognized internationally to have a number of specific features. The Freiheitliche Partei Osterreichs started as a ghetto party but gradually managed to move towards the center and to become acceptable to the other parties. The institutional framework in which political parties operate has changed considerably, if in a piecemeal fashion, in the post-war period. The notion of Lager parties involved life-long loyalty of supporters and even inter-generational party loyalty. The parties' moves towards the ideological center have their equivalent in an increasing concentration of the electorate in the political center; the left-right scale is losing more and more of its significance for understanding politics. The arena of party politics increased its importance vis-a-vis the corporatist arena, and within the individual parties power was shifted between the federal and the Land levels.
