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
Coalition agreements and governments’ policy-making productivity
- Author(s)
- Matthew Bergman, Mariyana Angelova, Hanna Bäck, Wolfgang C. Müller
- Abstract
One of the biggest challenges parties in multiparty governments face is making
policies together and overcoming the risk of a policy stalemate. Scholars have
devoted much attention to the study of how various institutions in cabinet
and parliament help coalition parties with conflicting policy preferences to be
efficient in the policy-making process. Coalition agreements are one of many
instruments coalition partners can use to facilitate policy making. However,
many scholars describe such agreements’ actual role as cheap talk, due to
their legally non-enforceable nature. Do coalition agreements make a difference
in the policy-making productivity of multiparty governments? To address this
question, this article focuses on governments’ policy output and investigates
whether coalition agreements increase the policy-making productivity of multiparty cabinets. Its central argument is that written agreements between
coalition partners strengthen the capacity of coalition governments to make
policy reforms, even when there is a high degree of ideological conflict among
partners. To evaluate this argument, the article analyzes data on economic
reform measures adopted by national governments in 11 Western European
countries over a 40-year period (1978–2017), based on a coding of more than
1000 periodical country reports issued by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU)
and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
The results show that while coalition agreements foster policy productivity in
minimal winning cabinets, they play a weaker role in minority and surplus
governments. Coalition agreements limit the negative effect of intra-cabinet
ideological conflict on reform productivity, suggesting that such contracts help
parties overcome the risk of policy stalemate.- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- External organisation(s)
- Lund University, Central European University Vienna
- Journal
- West European Politics
- Volume
- 47
- Pages
- 31-60
- No. of pages
- 30
- ISSN
- 0140-2382
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2022.2161794
- Publication date
- 10-2022
- 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/0ba7d446-09ab-4644-8865-5eea256bda4b