Research
Research
In its research and teaching, the Department of Government primarily focuses on comparative and Austrian politics. Its research is concerned with political behaviour, political actors, such as political parties and politicians, political institutions, the processes governed by these institutions, as well as their outcomes. It includes work on political participation, voting behaviour, parties and party competition, coalition politics and Austrian politics in general and is mostly based on rationalist and behavioural approaches.
Our goal is to conduct high-level, internationally competitive research in the area of Comparative Politics with the collaboration of international project partners and research networks. At the Faculty of Social Sciences the department is mainly engaged in the key research area ''Political Competition and Communication: Democratic Representation in Changing Societies'.
The department’s approach places it in the discipline’s empirical-analytical core and is mostly based on quantitative social science methods. To map empirical phenomena accurately, researcher in the department focus on the continuous development of survey design, as well as on the analysis of empirical data by applying the best suited statistical model. The department aims to achieve the best work on Austrian politics and to make important contributions to the international academic literature on Comparative Government and Politics.
An overview of current publications and activities at the department can be found below and on the personal websites of our team.
Publications
Veto Player Theory and Reform Making in Western Europe
- Author(s)
- Mariyana Angelova, Hanna Bäck, Wolfgang C. Müller, Daniel Strobl
- Abstract
Veto player theory generates predictions about governments’ capacity to change policy. However, due to the difficulty of identifying significant laws needed to change the policy status quo, veto player hypotheses have mainly been evaluated using data on outcome variables such as government spending, taxation and budget structures and rarely for actual reform making. Accordingly, evidence about governments’ ability to introduce policy change is provided for a limited number of reforms and single-country studies. To evaluate veto player theory across time, policy areas and countries, we gathered a dataset which incorporates about 5,600 important government reform measures in the areas of social, labor, economic and taxation policy undertaken in 13 Western European countries from the mid-1980s until the mid-2000s. Our results provide conditional support for the theory’s main expectations. We find that government ability to introduce reforms decreases with the ideological distance between the veto players in the political system, but only for partisan veto players in minimal winning cabinets, where each party is a veto player by virtue of its parliamentary seats. We also find that the number of reforms increases with greater ideological distance between the current government and the policy status quo.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- External organisation(s)
- Lund University
- Pages
- 1
- No. of pages
- 23
- Publication date
- 2016
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506014 Comparative politics
- Keywords
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/0780f73f-8147-485a-81eb-447a6f84f9ae