Haggling for the Equilibrium: The Renegotiation of the Austrian Coalition, 1959

Abstract

On May 10, 1959, Austrian voters, in giving overwhelming support to the coalition that has been governing them since 1945, split their ballots about as evenly as possible between the two competing coalition partners. The Socialist Party (SPOe) obtained 50.3 per cent of the vote cast for the coalition parties; but the People's Party (OeVP), despite a rigorous system of proportional representation, moved into the new Parliament with 79 seats, a plurality of one over the SPOe. The election of 1953 had shown strikingly similar results. Then, the Socialists had not been able to translate the electoral tie into a complete governmental equilibrium. This time, stung by losses sustained in the government negotiations after the OeVP's victory in the 1956 parliamentary election, and encouraged by its own victory in the 1957 presidential election, the Socialists demanded the formation of a government based on perfect equality of the two partners. They had waged the campaign with a plea to the voters to place the ship of state in equilibrium, and the voters had responded. For eleven weeks following the balloting, OeVP and SPOe engaged in coalition renegotiations which are recounted and analyzed in this study because of the light they throw on the nature of the rigid coalition that has become postwar Austria's contribution to the taxonomy of political institutions.