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
Testing Spatial Voting Models Using Simulated Data
- Author(s)
- Markus Wagner, Thomas Meyer, David Johann
- Abstract
The debate on how voters use party positions to determine their vote choice has remained inconclusive. This is partly because it is difficult to distinguish empirically between rival spatial models of voting. We argue that simulations can provide important new insights. Specifically, we use simulations to see what results we estimate for each spatial model with the advantage of knowing which specific model our simulated 'voters' based their vote choice on. We therefore proceed by first simulating sets of voters who choose parties based on one specific spatial model. Then, we run rival models on these data and examine the resulting model parameters. We find that we usually underestimate the 'true' effect of spatial voting effects on vote choices. Moreover, it is impossible to distinguish empirically between directional and compensational voters. Our findings encourage researchers to test these models in experiments or to consider the theories’ observable implications.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- Publication date
- 2013
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506014 Comparative politics
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/1eb924af-30b1-4362-bd2a-5d0997ec2bd3