ABSTRACT
Austrian social partnership is a specific mode of interest intermediation and interest politics. The structural dimension of interest associations encompasses the potential for representing interests to the outside as well as enforcing accords between associations in case of internal resistance. A major element of the process dimension of neocorporatism is the concertation of decisions in the realm of economic policy on the grounds of the fundamental readiness of all involved actors to cooperate, presuming that particular and general interests can be combined. Ideological elements such as social balance, cooperation and consensus building in spite of conflicting interests that mark social partnership as well, have a long-standing tradition in Austria. Cooperation and interest concertation of associations and the government became a stable pattern in the Second Republic, and despite current tendencies of erosion its end is not foreseeable.
