A district ( ; pl. ) is a second-level division of the executive arm of the Austrian government. District offices are the primary point of contact between residents and the state for most acts of government that exceed municipal purview: marriage licenses, driver licenses, passports, assembly permits, hunting permits, or dealings with public health officers for example all involve interaction with the district administrative authority ().
Austrian constitutional law distinguishes two types of district administrative authority: district commissions (), district administrative authorities that exist as stand-alone bureaus; statutory cities ( or ), cities that have been vested with district administration functions in addition to their municipal responsibilities, i.e. district administrative authorities that only exist as a secondary role filled by something that primarily is a city (marked in the table with an asterisk (*).
, there are 94 districts, of which 79 are districts headed by district commissions and 15 are statutory cities. Many districts are geographically congruent with one of the country's 113 judicial venues.
Statutory cities are not usually referred to as "districts" outside government publications and the legal literature. For brevity, government agencies will sometimes use the term "rural districts" () for districts headed by district commissions, although the expression does not appear in any law and many "rural districts" are not very rural.
District commissions A district headed by a district commission typically covers somewhere between ten and thirty municipalities. As a purely administrative unit, a district does not hold elections and therefore does not choose its own officials. It is administered by the district commission (, also translated as district authority). The district governor () is appointed by the provincial governor; the district civil servants are province employees.
In the provincial laws of Lower Austria and Vorarlberg, districts headed by district commissions are called administrative districts (Verwaltungsbezirke). In Burgenland, Carinthia, Salzburg, Styria, Upper Austria, and Tyrol, the term used is political district (politischer Bezirk). National law, including national constitutional law, uses all three variants interchangeably.Kaiserliche Entschließung vom 26. Juni 1849, wodurch die Grundzüge für die Organisation der politischen Verwaltungs-Behörden genehmiget werden; RGBl. 295/1849
The district commission is the representative organ of the state administration, and through that of the national administration. Its tasks include, for example: Issuing of identification documents, passports or driver's licenses Registration and regulation of companies and associations
District commissions were first introduced in 1849 during the rule of Franz Joseph I.RGBl 1849/295. Kaiserliche Entschließung, wodurch die Grundzüge für die Organisation der politischen Verwaltungs-Behörden genehmiget werden. In Allgemeines Reichs-Gesetz- und Regierungsblatt für das Kaiserthum Österreich, Jahrgang 1849, p. 459–469. In their current form they were defined in 1868, in a decree that stated that every province had to be divided into political subdivisions – districts – headed by a district governor.RGBl 1868/44. Gesetz vom 19. Mai 1868 über die Einrichtung der politischen Verwaltungsbehörden (…). In Reichs-Gesetz-Blatt für das Kaiserthum Österreich, Jahrgang 1868, p. 76–81. The 1868 Act establishing districts in their modern form adds the terms "administrative district" (Amtsbezirk) and "political administrative district" (politischer Amtsbezirk).Gesetz von 19. Mai 1868, über die Einrichtung der politischen Verwaltungsbehörden; RGBl. 44/1868
The 1920 Federal Constitutional Law prefers "district" but occasionally uses "political district" to emphasize is it not referring to judicial districts. Over the course of the dozens of revisions the Law has undergone since 1920, all occurrences of either were excised; the version currently in force still mentions district administrative authorities but no longer mentions districts.
The 1955 Austrian State Treaty contains a reference to the "administrative districts" of Carinthia, Burgenland, and Styria, even though local legal documents would have called them "political districts".Staatsvertrag, betreffend die Wiederherstellung eines unabhängigen und demokratischen Österreich; BGBl. 152/1955
Statutory cities
A statutory city is a city vested with both municipal and district administrative responsibility.Federal Constitutional Law article 116; BGBl. 1/1930; last amended in BGBl. 100/2003 Town hall personnel also serve as district personnel; the mayor also discharges the powers and duties of a head of district commission. City management thus functions both as a regional government and a branch of the national government at the same time.
Most of the 15 statutory cities are major regional population centers with residents numbering in the tens of thousands. The smallest statutory city is barely more than a village, but it owes its status to a quirk of history: Rust, Burgenland, current population 2000 (2021), has enjoyed special autonomy since it was made a royal free city by the Kingdom of Hungary in 1681; its privilege was grandfathered into the district system when Hungary ceded the region (later called Burgenland) to Austria in 1921.
The constitution stipulates that a community with at least 20,000 residents can demand to be elevated to statutory city status by its respective province, unless the province can demonstrate this would jeopardize regional interests, or unless the national government objects. The last community to have invoked this right is Wels, a statutory city since 1964. , fifteen other communities are eligible but not interested.
The statutory city of Vienna, a community with well over 1.9 million residents, is divided into 23 municipal districts (Gemeindebezirke). Despite the similar name and the comparable role they fill, municipal districts have a different legal basis than districts. The statutory cities of Graz and Klagenfurt also have subdivisions referred to as "municipal districts," but these are merely neighborhood-size divisions of the city administration.
Naming quirks Austria strictly speaking does not name districts but district administrative authorities. The German term for "district commission" and "city," Bezirkshauptmannschaft and Stadt, respectively, is part of the official proper name of each such entity. This means that there can be pairs of districts whose two proper names contain the same toponym. Several such pairs do in fact exist. There are, for example, two district administrative authorities sharing the toponym Innsbruck: the (statutory) city of Innsbruck and the Innsbruck district commission.
To avoid confusion, the names of the rural districts in these pairs are commonly rendered with the suffix -Land, in this context roughly meaning "region." The customary name for the city of Innsbruck is Innsbruck, the customary name for the district headed by the Innsbruck district commission is Innsbruck-Land. While this usage is nearly universal both in the media and in everyday spoken German and even appears in the occasional government publication, the suffix -Land is not part of any official, legal designation in Lower Austria.
History Habsburg Monarchy and Austrian Empire
From the Middle Ages until the early nineteenth century, what would become the Austrian state – the Habsburg monarchy – was a large collection of formally separate feudal entities in a personal union under a single monarch of the house of Habsburg (Habsburg-Lorraine from 1780) rather than a single unified state. These entities were until the mid-eighteenth century absolute monarchies with no written constitution and no modern concept of the rule of law. Some of these entities lay within the Holy Roman Empire (the , the Lands of the Bohemian Crown, 1714–97 the Austrian Netherlands) while others lay outside it (the Kingdoms of Hungary and Croatia; from 1711 Transylvania; from 1772 Galicia and Lodomeria, among others). The modern state of Salzburg and parts of the surrounding states at this time belonged to the Prince-Archbishopric of Salzburg and numerous small enclaves belonging to other ecclesiastical principalities existed within the .
The states were ruled by the monarch, usually the emperor himself or a vassal of the emperor, supported by their personal advisors and the estates of the realm. The precise nature of the relationship between ruler and estates was different from region to region. Regional administrators were appointed by and answerable to the monarch.
The first step towards modern bureaucracy was taken by Empress Maria Theresa, who in 1753 imposed a system of 'circles'/districts () and 'circle'/district offices () throughout most of her realms. The 'circles' of Upper and Lower Austria and Styria were largely based on the pre-existing quarters of those realms. A major break with tradition, the system was unpopular at first; "in some provinces considerable resistance had to be overcome." The district offices never became fully operational in the Kingdom of Hungary or the Austrian Netherlands.
In 1804, in response to the declaration of the First French Empire and the ongoing Napoleonic Wars, Holy Roman Emperor Francis II declared himself Francis I, Emperor of Austria and unified the Habsburg realms into the Austrian Empire, while also remaining Holy Roman Emperor. The formerly separate realms became crownlands of this new Empire; those which were part of the Holy Roman Empire remained part of both. Francis dissolved the Holy Roman Empire in 1806. As a result of the German mediatisations and the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, culminating in the 1815 Congress of Vienna, various territories, including Salzburg (until 1849 a 'circle' of Upper Austria), had become part of the new Empire, while other areas such as the Southern Netherlands and Further Austria (excluding Vorarlberg) had been lost.
Following the first wave of the revolutions of 1848, Emperor Ferdinand I and his minister of the interior, Franz Xaver von Pillersdorf, enacted Austria's first formal constitution. The constitution completely abolished the estates and called for a separation of executive and judicial authority, immediately crippling most existing regional institutions and leaving district offices as the backbone of the empire's administration. With Ferdinand having been forced to abdicate by a second wave of revolutions, his successor Franz Joseph I swiftly went to work transforming Austria from a constitutional monarchy back into an absolute one but kept relying on district offices at first. In fact, he strengthened the system.
His March Constitution retained the separation of judiciary and executive. It prescribed a partition of the empire into judicial venues, with courts to be headed by professional judges, and a separate partition into administrative districts, to be headed by professional civil servants. An 1849 Imperial Resolution fleshed out the details. The districts started functioning in 1850, many of them already in their present-day borders.