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
Ambiguity and vagueness in party competition
- Author(s)
- Katrin Praprotnik, Laurenz Ennser-Jedenastik
- Abstract
A central theme emerging from recent research on party competition is that political actors sometimes remain deliberately opaque in their communication. This phenomenon has been investigated under labels such as position-blurring, ambiguity, issue clarity or ideological clarity. In this paper we propose a distinction between two concepts that are sometimes conflated in this literature: ambiguity and vagueness. While ambiguity means that there is substantial variance in parties' positional signals, vagueness denotes political statements that are non-committal in terms of the policy action to be taken or the outcome to be achieved. We explore the co-variation of these two dimensions and their relationship to issue ownership and government status using manifesto data produced by the Austrian National Election Study. These data are unique in that they provide detailed positional information as well as information on policy commitment (election pledges). We show that the two dimensions are uncorrelated and have opposite relationships with issue ownership (vagueness positive, ambiguity negative). We conclude that analyses of position-blurring in party competition should take different strategies of non-clarity in party communication into account.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- External organisation(s)
- Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz
- Journal
- Party Politics
- ISSN
- 1354-0688
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1177/13540688231195272
- Publication date
- 2023
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506014 Comparative politics
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Sociology and Political Science
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/2fbff3f9-76a6-45d7-be35-41a844c6e3d8