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
The intra-party bargain over ministerial appointments: how party leader performance affects the ‘partyness’ of government
- Author(s)
- Matthias Kaltenegger
- Abstract
In parliamentary democracies, the logic of delegation from voters to government requires that political parties control government actions. Recruiting government personnel through the party organisation is the primary mechanism for parties to retain such a dominance over the government. Existing research has examined secular trends and cross-sectional variance in ministers’ party ties, mostly focussing on appointments of party members to government office. By contrast, this article centres on the appointment of members of the party elite as a yardstick for party control over government. It explores short-term variance in the ‘partyness’ of appointments, arguing that performance-related shifts in the intra-party power balance condition party elites’ access to ministerial office. Utilising data on ministerial appointments in Austria (1945–2017; n = 603), the article demonstrates that successful party leaders can relax party control by minimising appointments of party elite members, while relatively unsuccessful leaders have to compensate party elites with government jobs.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- Journal
- West European Politics
- Volume
- 46
- Pages
- 1156-1177
- No. of pages
- 22
- ISSN
- 0140-2382
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2022.2112482
- Publication date
- 2022
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506014 Comparative politics
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Political Science and International Relations
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/0af35a23-7d57-445b-88fe-5f98f91e14f3