Frederick C. Engelmann

Partisan Stability and the Continuity of a Segmented Society: The Austrian Case

Austria has been described as a prototypic segmented society. Religion, social class, and ideology produce sharp distinctions that are incorporated into all aspects of the political life of the country. With pressures from secularization and rising living standards, it can be questioned from secularization and rising living standards, it can be questioned whether current voter loyalties should be solely related to historic ties with parties. A survey conducted in Austria in 1968 demonstrated that, beyond the organizational continuity of parties and the persistence of social cleavages, there was a separate line of continuity for partisan stability associated with the nature of group ties. While the group benefits that come from a particular party are not always evident, the social bonds linking individuals to parties in a sense bypass this political content. Some of the qualities of Austrian political life for example, the lengthy experience of a coalition government that established a system for sharing administrative offices on the basis of party affiliation are unique, but this should not obscure the more general relevance of the findings: that primary group ties continue to have a political importance even when the structural bases of the ties are weakened.

Austria's Consistent Voters

The history of mass participation in Austrian politics, now nearly a century in duration, has been marked by polarization along lines of religion, social class, and ideology. This is a product of Austria’s division into Lager (camps) (Wandruska, 1954, Diamant, 1958), similar to the Dutch zuilen (pillars) (Lorwin, 1971; Lijphart, 1968; Daalder, 1966; Dunn, 1972). These camps include the now virtually defunct German-nationalist, which declined after 1918 and was only temporarily revived by Hitler from 1930 to 1945. Much more important are the clerical-conservative and the labour-socialist camps. They