The Austrian Welfare State: A Halfway House

The Austrian welfare state is stable and its basic structure is not in question. Its social policy is influenced by the neoliberal mainstream in Europe. Because of the “Social partnership” – a highly structured cooperation of employee’s organisations and employers’ organisations that has been acting since the 1970s as a parallel decision-making field besides parliament and government – there is still a relatively high level of a welfare state. However, since the 1970s and earlier, the welfare state has been dominated by a paternalistic and expertocratic leadership culture that stigmatises marginalised groups and maintains economic and social exclusion. This leadership culture is reflected in social work and thus prevents professionally well-founded innovations from being rolled out in its fields of action. In the country of psychotherapy and psychology, social work is marginalised in public discourses. For decades there have been unsuccessful attempts to develop a professional legal structure for social work similar to those found in psychotherapy and psychology. As a result, the influence of social work on Austrian social policy is very limited.