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
Punishing the pseudo-opposition
- Author(s)
- Ida Hjermitslev
- Abstract
Minority governments often rely on the legislative support of parties, which play an ambiguous role in politics: while they are formally part of the opposition, they are simultaneously committed to keeping the government in office and passing its bills. Are these support parties protected from the electoral cost of governing or do voters recognize their responsibility for policy outcomes and hold them accountable? I hypothesize that voters who are dissatisfied with government performance will have less sympathy towards and will be less likely to vote for support parties. Using Comparative Study of Electoral Systems data, I find consistent support for both hypotheses. Voters seem to recognize the connection between support parties and the government and have both an affective and an electoral response to it. While voters dislike support parties more than junior members when they are dissatisfied with government performance, they punish the two types of parties similarly at elections. Support parties are thus in no way exempt from the accountability mechanisms.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- Journal
- European Journal of Political Research
- ISSN
- 0304-4130
- Publication date
- 08-2023
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506014 Comparative politics
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/3490cee2-0204-4efe-8396-316b4d253804