On the continued stability of the social partnership and concertative governance in Austria: A functionalist interpretation

Abstract

While numerous studies show the corporatist style of governance to be on the decline in many western European democracies, Austria, for most analysts, continues to be governed by relatively harmonious practices of institutionalized corporatist concertation. In contrast to the currently popular mainstream assumption that the stability of Austrian corporatism can be traced in large part to Austria's unique and historically well‐established “culture of consensus,” this essay argues that the persistence of corporatism in Austria is attributable largely to the fact that market forces have yet to assume corporatism's functional role of securing labor discipline and wage demand moderation. As such, Austrian capitalists, in contrast to their counterparts in Europe's other postwar corporatist societies, remain reluctant to disassociate themselves entirely from corporatist political structures and to move toward more market‐based forms of industrial relations and economic decisionmaking.