Gratitude for care usually comes afterwards. For the children of the Verzorgingsstaat the moment of looking back in gratitude has not arrived yet. For the time being, they are still disappointed and angry, because the Verzorgingsstaat suddenly appears to be no longer capable of fulfilling their expectations without saying (Schnabel 1983: 25). Since 1983 the situation seems to have changed. The children of the Dutch Verzorgingsstaat (zorg = care) have left their parental home. They still do not look back in gratitude, but neither in anger. They have learned to take care of themselves and have broadened their horizons. Most of them come home for a cup of tea, but some also for their laundry. We have entered the post-welfare era.

Anyone interested in the welfare state as a field of research can hardly avoid coming across the notion the Scandinavian model. The 1980s saw a proliferation of publications making claims to the existence of a particular type of welfare state in the Scandinavian countries. Various attempts have been made to explain and specify the model, either narrowly as the Scandinavian model, or more broadly as a clustering into a type of regime of fairly common features. Emphasis has been placed on the strong elements of citizenship rights and state responsibility, and of public welfare systems built upon compulsion and taxation (Erikson et al. 1987; Esping-Andersen 1990, Kuhnle 1990, 1991).

Electoral behaviour has traditionally been a major concern for Italian political scientists and, as a consequence, empirical research has primarily been concentrated in this field of study. During the 1950s and early 1960s a plethora of works on electoral behaviour were published, mainly of a descriptive or exploratory nature. Both at the methodological and theoretical level, a plurality of approaches were adopted because of the conviction that no single approach could be exhaustive (Spreafico & La Palombara 1963).

It is difficult to understand and impossible to justify, but it is a fact: though post-war Germany was erected both psychologically and economically on the expanding base of a booming economy, German political science up to the present day has not produced a convincing systematic approach which could provide secure guidance for an analysis of the past or the contemporary relationship between economy and politics in this country. In the political science contributions of the immediate post-war years the descriptive positivism of the Gert von Eynern school of political economy (von Eynern 1972) prevailed.

Austrian political parties have an interest for international political scientists quite out of proportion to the significance of the country itself. Though Austria is a small country (still) outside the framework of the EC, her parties have three distinctive qualities. First, the party system was enormously concentrated for most of the post war-period. Despite a PR electoral system the two big parties, the Socialist Party (SP, Social Democratic Party since 1991) and the Austrian People's Party (VP) managed to win an average of 90.2% of the popular vote and 94% of the seats from 1945 until 1983. The second distinctive feature is the enormous size of the party organisations.

What is the matter with the German parties? Why this crisis of acceptance and vexation? Have they not led the Federal Republic in more than four decades firmly and safely from the ashes left by an unprecedented dictatorship into a stable, wealthy and well-recognized democracy? Can't we feel satisfied with this and, indeed, weren't we for quite a long time during which Germany became renowned for its exceptionally stable and concentrated party system? What has changed since those days of political tranquility, that political parties and politicians are now at an all-time low of public esteem, that people turn away from their favorite parties and either abstain from voting, or turn to the right-wing Republikaner (in the West) and to the leftwing PDS (in the East), and that even President von Weizsacker charges the parties with an obsession with power and with incompetence (von Weizsacker 1992)?