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 (Bezirksverwaltungsbehörde).

In Burgenland, Carinthia, Salzburg, Styria, Upper Austria, and Tyrol, the term used is political district (politischer Bezirk).

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 German term for "district commission" and "city," Bezirkshauptmannschaft and Stadt, respectively, is part of the official proper name of each such entity.

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."

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.

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.

The first step towards modern bureaucracy was taken by Empress Maria Theresa, who in 1753 imposed a system of 'circles'/districts (Kreise)[note 3] and 'circle'/district offices (Kreisämter) throughout most of her realms.

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.

[15] This administrative structure did not apply to Lombardy–Venetia, Hungary (which at the time excluded Transylvania and the Voivodeship of Serbia and Banat of Temeschwar, which did use the system), or the Military Frontier; Croatia and Slavonia used the term Comitatus (contemporary German: Comitat, modern Komitat; Croatian: županija) in place of Kreis.

The Kingdom of Hungary was now a separate country, fully independent in every respect save defense and international relations, and neither needed nor wanted to copy civil administration policies enacted in Vienna.

Vienna was growing significantly during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, absorbing dozens of suburbs.

[17] At least one of the principal framers, Karl Renner, had suggested to endow districts with county-like elected councils and some degree of legislative authority, but could not gain consensus for this idea.

[20] In 1921, Hungary ceded the German-speaking part in the western region to Austria, this was created a new province and became Burgenland.

While part of the Kingdom of Hungary, the rural border region had been partitioned into seven wards (Oberstuhlrichterämter), clusters of small towns and villages headed by a magistrate who served as both the district judge and the supervisor of the local administrators.

Reborn with the downfall of Nazi Germany in 1945, the Republic of Austria immediately restored the administrative structure torn down between 1938 and 1940, putting the districts back in place.

Most of Lower Austria had been leaning conservative to nationalist for a century; Vienna had been a bastion of Social Democracy for decades.

The bureaucracy steering Vienna, a city of industry and finance, was sociologically distant from the agricultural countryside.

Some of the suburbs affected, however, had long had much closer ties to the capital than to the rest of their former province, both socially and in terms of infrastructure.

Reaffirming the Nazi border changes either entirely or in part, on the other hand, would have led to demarcation discrepancies between Austrian and allied administrative divisions.

Hotly contested between the Social Democrats dominating Vienna and the People's Party ruling Lower Austria, the question was not resolved until 1954.