5 Austria: transformation driven by an established party
MARTIN DOLEZAL
Introduction
Austrian post-war politics until the 1980s was a classic example of
stability. For almost forty years after 1945, either the Social Democrats
(SPÖ) or the Christian Democrats (ÖVP) governed the country: from
1945 to 1966 together in a grand coalition, the type of government most
1
oftenassociatedwithAustria. From1966to1983,firsttheÖVP,then the SPÖ (1970–83), managed to
achieve majorities of their own and built five consecutive single-party governments. Until the early
1980s, voters were extremely loyal to the major parties not least because they were not affected
by several social and economic problems experienced in other European countries, such as
mass unemployment, strikes and riots, which famously inspired Pope Paul VI to call Austria an
‘Island of the Blessed’.
Since the 1980s, Austria has experienced far-reaching developments: the breakdown of Austro-
Keynesianism and nationalized industries led to important changes in macro-economic policy,
because market forces have become accepted as a legitimate instrument for achieving growth
(Lauber 1992: 170; Winckler 1988). The end of the communist regimes in neigh- bouring
countries redeemed Austria from its status as a Western border state, but civil wars in the
Balkans gave rise to almost forgotten fears for security and led to waves of refugees. EU
membership was finally achieved in 1995, but quarrels about neutrality, the ‘sanctions’ against
the govern- ment in 2000, and the opening of borders to East European workers gave rise to
Euroscepticism. These external developments combined with a declining importance of the once
dominant model of consociational democracy have resulted in an ongoing reduction of national
idiosyncra- sies; a process Pelinka (1995) has called ‘De-Austrification’.
1 From 1945 to 1947, the small Communist Party (KPÖ) was included in government to appease the Soviet forces that
occupied the eastern part of Austria until it regained independence in 1955.
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106 Martin Dolezal
Austria, therefore, is a good case to exemplify political change since the 1990s. In particular, the
developments in the party system, above all the rise of the right-wing populist FPÖ, have been
described as ‘drastic’ (Müller 2000: 46). It is the purpose of this chapter to analyze these
developments with regard to the general political transformations in Europe. Coming back to
Pope Paul VI, Austria has certainly lost its character of an island and it is increasingly a part of a
globalizing world.
Social-economic and political context conditions
The consequences of globalization have a strong impact on all countries and societies. If
‘happiness is finding a force or event which affects a number of societies at the same time’
(Gourevitch 1977: 281), we probably have found this force. Even though globalization is the deci-
sive factor for the transformation of societal conflicts in European democracies, this does not
mean that national particularities have lost all of their explanatory power. On the contrary, the
question if and how the new structural conflict is expressed and incorporated into party
competition depends on several factors summarized as ‘context condi- tions’. These conditions
determine, first, the existence or strength of new political potentials and, secondly, the
possibilities and strategies for their mobilization. Four important factors already introduced in
Chapter 2 will be briefly discussed: the relative strength of traditional cleavages, the economic
development, the cultural context, and finally several political factors.
Relative strength of traditional cleavages
The strength of traditional cleavages is negatively correlated with the
new conflict’s potential to mobilize. Assuming a zero-sum hypothesis,
we expect the breakthrough of the new conflict to occur only in those
countries where old divisions are solved or have lost much of their
political salience (see Kriesi and Duyvendak 1995: 5–10). In Austria,
class and religion – more precisely, religiousness because of a religiously
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