The Chamber of Labour elections | AK Wahlen 1949-2019
Austria has 26% of employee in trade union, this is 33rd place in the world, however there is labour organisation in Austria where all workers are members, even non-citizens like me and I become curious.
The Chamber of Labour (also known as AK, abbreviation for Arbeiterkammer) represents workers in Austria, membership is compulsory. It is quite a unique organisation without the analogs in other European countries, according to Oberhuber et.al., 2014. Despite the fact that membership is mandatory there are elections to assembly and in 2024 there is an election in AK. Those happening in various dates in various regions, for instance in Tirol, Voralberg and Upper Austria they are already over. And that is a rare occasion where I, as non-citizen, can vote.
I’ve took and cleaned up the data and build a few graphs to answer the questions that arise in my head. How in general is turnout? Below I compare it to the turnout of the parliament elections, the latter is quite impressive on it’s own.
As Oberhuber et. al., 2014 mention this kind of second order elections, which don’t allow direct influence on the government are in general has lower importance by parties, voters and therefore turnout is lower, actually it’s lower than in EU parliament (data for Austria).
Plus some changes in labor market structure and laws affects it. One could see a significant drop in turnout in 1994 and increase in 2000, it has a lot to do with an increase of vote base by 31% and later decrease1.
Without digging into the data further who do you think most common winner for such a chamber? Just pause a bit and think - I bet you thought socialist. If not please write me why not? It’s a socialist structure by foundation, supposed to protect workers, created as a counterweight to the chambers of commerce. Yes, overall always socialists won the leadership in AK. Here comes my second question. How it correlates with parliament elections?
As could be seen only socialists (SPÖ2) has a gap downwards, result in parliament always lower than in AK elections. From the last elections in 2019 the gap between results in AK (60%) and parliament (21%) is the biggest. For ÖVP the gap sometimes is really small and volatile, starting from 90s. FPÖ gap is growing lately with their increased popularity in parliament but their representation in AK remain more or less stable.
The open, rather rhetorical question I have is the following. While almost everybody vote for socialists to protect herself as an employee why people vote for other parties during parliament elections?
Maps of voting are a bit boring as FSG (SPÖ) always has majority, except in Tirol and Vorarlberg where ÖAAB (ÖVP) take a lead since 1984.
Cleaned data of Chamber of Labour elections (AK Wahlen 1949- 2019) could be downloaded from repository https://github.com/vearlen/ak_wahl. Source of data: AK, Ilya Tishchenko; data is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Footnotes
Electoral law reform from 1992 included unemployed, women on maternity leave and marginally employed people, however in 1998 they should register for votes and therefore number decreased.↩︎
I’ll call it SPÖ for simplicity, though in AK elections it’s FSG, same applies to other major parties ÖVP, FPÖ↩︎