Political profiling

This paper presents a qualitative study of the political spectrum in Austria and focuses on current positioning practices in political discourse. To this end, four representatives of Austrian parliamentary parties were interviewed in depth and evaluated using objective hermeneutics. In the theoretical section, following an introductory historical overview, different diagnoses of the times and society are discussed with a focus on political sociology and the much-discussed ‘depoliticisation of politics’. Four structural hypotheses can be extracted as manifestations of this complex phenomenon, which can be subsumed under the terms ‘personalisation’ or ‘moralisation (of politics)’, ‘narrowing (of the corridor of opinion)’ and ‘flattening (of discourse)’. These point to a change in politics itself, away from the antagonistic competition of traditionally founded worldviews towards a consensual discursive order within the framework of a meta-ideology that operates at the level of the collective subconscious and thus cannot be the subject of political debate.