ABSTRACT
Politics and the political culture of a society are determined by a specific relationship between group and organization. The crucial indicators for the state of society are the specific configurations within and between groups. Politics is a process that takes place on both the microlevel and the macrolevel. The microlevel is the action field of small groups. Austria and Poland have both experienced political partition and even civil war between ideologically defined camps. The macropolitically defined divisions were between the bourgeois and the Socialist camp in Austria and between the Communist Party and everybody else in Poland. In Poland, macropolitical cleavage is not repeated on the microlevel. The boundaries of political alignment run across families and peer groups. There is a relatively high incidence of "mixed" marriages, and there is hardly a friendship network, let alone a working place, that is politically homogeneous.
