ABSTRACT
This chapter presents Austria profiles of longstanding democracies and of the European Union, and provides essential detail on history, electoral system, political parties and cleavages, and governments. Centuries of imperial rule gave way at the end of World War One to the first Austrian Republic, which was characterized by extreme polarization between Socialists and Christian Socials. The country often seemed on the brink of civil war, and a brief civil war did actually occur in 1934. The postwar Austrian party system was one of the most stable in Europe, based as it was on deeply rooted subcultures, two of which were central. The first of these Lager was the Catholic-conservative Lager, represented by the Austrian People’s Party, founded in 1945. The other main Lager has the socialist one, represented primarily by the Socialist Party of Austria, founded in 1889, but also for a time after the war by the Communist Party of Austria, founded in 1918.
