ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts an historical typology of voters in Austria, including the female part of the population who entered the picture when they were granted suffrage in 1919. One of the facts to emerge from a comparison of historical Austrian election results—in spite of problems with vote weighting and the exclusion of women and members of the armed forces from the 1907 and 1911 elections—is the trebling of the numbers of citizens entitled to vote in the period between 1907. Social Democratic electoral success remained focused on Vienna, which was both a strength and a source of controversy. A number of Allied experts pointed out that Austrian voters had had little experience with a live democracy and that the monarchy had been an authoritarian system. Austrian consensual democracy, which has often been called a democracy of proporz, was the result, both of necessities active within the country itself and of geo-strategic necessities.
