ABSTRACT
Historically, Austria has been identified as a conservative welfare state with a strong role of social partners and a long history of incremental reforms and continuity in social policies. In this chapter, we examine the development of the Austrian welfare state between 1998 and 2018. Based on assessments of policy outcomes (according to which Austria performed comparatively well) and reforms implemented within selected social policy fields, we still do not identify paradigmatic changes. Rather, welfare state reform continued to be incremental and was less path-departing than in other European countries. While the assessment provides examples of reforms with a Keynesian, a neoliberal or a social investment orientation, policymakers only picked certain ideas of these ideologies, such as activation, cost containment, familialism, harmonisation or deservingness, and applied and combined them in a distinct, and conservative, way; hence an Austrification of the welfare state and of welfare state change.
