Politics of Austria

The politics of Austria take place in a framework of a federal parliamentary representative democratic republic, with a Federal Chancellor as the head of government, and a Federal President as head of state. Governments, both local and federal, exercise executive power. Federal legislative power is vested both in the government and in the two chambers of parliament, the National Council and the Federal Council. Since 1949 the conservative Austrian People's Party (ÖVP) and the center-left Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ) have largely dominated the party-political landscape of Austria.

The judiciary is independent of the executive and the legislature, and exclusively federal in nature: there are no state courts.

The ethnically and culturally heterogeneous nation state of Austria is one of the many remnant states of Austria-Hungary, a vast multinational empire that ceased to exist in 1918. The Austrian Republic was preceded by a constitutional monarchy, whose legislative body was elected by, as The New York Times put it, "quasi-universal (male) suffrage" for the first time in 1897.

Austria's first attempt at republican governance, after the fall of the monarchy in 1918, was severely hampered by the crippling economic costs of war reparations required by the victorious Allies. Austria's First Republic (1918–1938) made some pioneering reforms in the 1920s, particularly in Vienna, that served as models for the social-welfare states of post-World War II Europe. However, the Republic gradually developed into an Austrofascist dictatorship between 1933-1934 under Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, whom Nazi party agents assassinated in 1934. The First Republic ended with invasion and annexation by Germany in 1938. Following the defeat of Germany in 1945 Austria resumed its republican government.

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