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
From palimpsest to me-moire
- Author(s)
- Peter Pirker, Philipp Rode, Mathias Lichtenwagner
- Abstract
This paper presents a model for exploring urban memorial landscapes on political violence. It is based on a survey of more than 1,600 memorials erected in public spaces of the Austrian capital, Vienna, since 1945 with references to the Austrofascist and the National Socialist regimes. The paper builds on existing theoretical and methodological concepts, such as the 'social production of space' (Von Seggern & Werner, Low); the 'socio-spatial condition of commemoration' (Dwyer & Alderman), 'symbolic accretion' (Dwyer) and 'figurations of memory' (Olick), and submits them to quantitative analysis using descriptive statistics and mapping. In order to distinguish between temporal and spatial patterns of memorialization, the paper explores all memorials along a range of spatial, temporal, thematic and social subjects and then identifies 'layers of memorialization', which express the structure under which mnemonic actors at specific times and under specific political conditions have addressed and negotiated specific issues of political violence worth of memorialization. After an analytical disentanglement, the paper presents a recomposed map of the urban memorial landscape by overlaying the main spatial-temporal clusters of six layers of memorialization. Instead of applying the widely used term of 'palimpsest', the paper suggests the notion of 'me-moire' for grasping the historically and spatially structured co-existence of diverse temporalities, issues and social and political dimensions present in the urban memorial landscape on political violence.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- External organisation(s)
- University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences
- Journal
- Political Geography
- Volume
- 74
- No. of pages
- 19
- ISSN
- 0962-6298
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2019.102057
- Publication date
- 2019
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506010 Policy analysis
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Geography, Planning and Development, History, Sociology and Political Science
- Sustainable Development Goals
- SDG 16 - Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/3205c057-0a32-47ac-9bd7-bb0e30c07abd