Brief history and structure of the discipline

In the history of the social sciences, Austria, and its capital Vienna in particular, has long inhabited a special role, despite the precarious status of many of its proponents at the fringes of the academic world. People like Marie Jahoda or Paul Felix Lazarsfeld who became world famous upon their arrival in the U.S. with its more receptive academic culture made their first steps as social scientists here; however, the issue of scientifically assessing the domain of politics and policy-making remained almost exclusively in the hands of jurists (even though some of them were open towards matters of analysing political regimes and contributing to democratic theory, such as Hans Kelsen) (Ehs, 2010). With the consecutive regimes of authoritarianism, then fascism, then restorative democracy between the early 1930s and the late 1960s, the voices of emerging social scientists were almost entirely suppressed and forced to leave (Fleck, 2011). Thus, unlike most of the other European countries on the Western side of the Iron Curtain, Austria did not develop a separate discipline of political science during the conservative decade of the 1950s.