ABSTRACT
The changing of political issues and the resultant effects on the political system, in particular the party system, was long one of the questions in political science, not only in Austria, upon which little light was shed. Study and analysis were either limited:
to the field of electoral and voter motivation research, which long seemed rather unproductive, particularly in Austria, due in no small measure to the highly stable voting behavior of the electorate over long periods of time, and the large proportion of traditional voters which prevailed until the end of the 1960s (Gehmacher 1982; Haerpfer 1983) 1
or to specific fields of research, such as research concentrating on the young, party platforms, parliamentarianism (Gerlich/Ucakar 1981), or participation (Deiser/Winkler 1982).
