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
Negative Campaigning and Vote Choice in Europe
- Author(s)
- Daniel Weitzel, Zeynep Somer-Topcu
- Abstract
Parties spend parts of their campaigns criticizing other parties’ performance and characteristics, such as honesty, integrity, unity. These attacks aim to affect the target parties’ electoral performance negatively. But do they work? We argue that while attacks are informative, how voters react to negative campaigning depends on their partisanship. While the target’s copartisans are more likely to get mobilized in favor of their party, the attacker’s copartisans are expected to punish the target, due to their respective partisan motivations. We expect different motivations to result in null effects of campaign attacks for other parties’ partisans and nonpartisans. Combining a new dataset on campaign rhetoric with survey data from eight European countries, we show support for most but not all of our expectations. These results have important implications for the electoral campaigns literature
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- External organisation(s)
- University of Texas, Austin
- Journal
- Comparative Political Studies
- ISSN
- 0010-4140
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414022107428
- Publication date
- 2021
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506014 Comparative politics
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/2d9ef8b0-5258-4c92-84c9-a35d29dc1664