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
Decade of Party Distrust
- Author(s)
- Matthew Bergman, Gianluca Passarelli, Fabio Serricchio
- Abstract
One common feature of the Italian political space over the past half century has been the presence of distrust in political parties and the presence of anti-system parties on both the left and the right. Discontent with existing elites and the political system has taken many forms, including referendums altering the electoral system. Both the character of the main parties and the rules by which they are elected have been reformed 4 times since the 1980s. However, as the elections of 2013 and 2018 and the referendum of 2016 demonstrate, Italians still have a high amount of resentment towards party elites and the operation of the system. Using data from Italian National Election Studies, this paper traces the development of this party resentment with a focus on three questions: 1) How has resentment towards party representiveness changed with the electoral and party reforms 2) Who was likely to hold this resentment 3) What was the party affiliation of those most resentful, or did they abstain? Results stress that socio-demographic differences had little effect on understanding the source of party resentment; distrust in parties correlates well with distrust in parlia-ment and political administration. General social distrust did not translate into a distrust for parties. We conclude that discontent can be separated into a political dimen-sion associated with current governance and one of a more systemic nature.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- External organisation(s)
- Sapienza University of Rome, Università degli Studi del Molise
- Journal
- Quaderni dell'Osservatorio elettorale (QOE) – Italian Journal of Electoral Studies (IJES)
- Volume
- 83
- Pages
- 15-25
- No. of pages
- 11
- ISSN
- 0392-6753
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.36253/qoe-9590
- Publication date
- 12-2020
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506014 Comparative politics
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/2c9b6277-f38a-455c-9a2e-381ef62b9c9d