Economic Policy-Making: Austria’s ‘Elastic Band’

Abstract

When in 1966 Austrians found themselves, for the first time in a generation, with a one-party government, many felt afraid. Some of the middle class feared that the Socialists would go ‘into the streets’, and that there would be strikes, demonstrations and class war. Some Socialists feared that the People’s Party would make use of its political monopoly to force its will — or the will of the big industrialists — on the workers, and to rob the Socialist Party of its hard-fought positions of power in political and economic life.