Country Profiles

The Austrian Federal Assembly is composed of two houses—the Nationalrat , the lower house, and the Bundesrat , the upper house. Legislative authority is concentrated in the Nationalrat . Its 183 members are elected in a three-tiered system, based on proportional representation with a 4 percent electoral hurdle for representation. The sixty-four members of the much weaker Bundesrat are elected by the legislatures of the nine provinces. The governors of Austria’s nine Länder are elected by the provincial legislatures. The Austrian president is directly elected by a majority in the first ballot, or a plurality in the second. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Ballot · Democracy · Electoral system · Legislature · Lower house · Parliament · Political science · Politics · Proportional representation · Representation (politics) · Voting · European Union Policy and Governance · Law · Law and Political Science · Political Systems and Governance · Public Administration