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
Abductive Coding
- Author(s)
- Luis Vila-Henninger, Claire Dupuy, Virginie Van Ingelgom, Mauro Caprioli, Ferdinand Teuber, Damien Pennetreau, Margherita Bussi, Cal Le Gall
- Abstract
Qualitative secondary analysis has generated heated debate regarding the epistemology of qualitative research. We argue that shifting to an abductive approach provides a fruitful avenue for qualitative secondary analysts who are oriented towards theory-building. However, the concrete implementation of abduction remains underdeveloped—especially for coding. We address this key gap by outlining a set of tactics for abductive analysis that can be applied for qualitative analysis. Our approach applies Timmermans and Tavory's (Timmermans and Tavory 2012; Tavory and Timmermans 2014) three stages of abduction in three steps for qualitative (secondary) analysis: Generating an Abductive Codebook, Abductive Data Reduction through Code Equations, and In-Depth Abductive Qualitative Analysis. A key contribution of our article is the development of “code equations”—defined as the combination of codes to operationalize phenomena that span individual codes. Code equations are an important resource for abduction and other qualitative approaches that leverage qualitative data to build theory.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- External organisation(s)
- Université catholique de Louvain, Aarhus University
- Journal
- Sociological Methods and Research
- Volume
- 53
- Pages
- 968-1001
- No. of pages
- 34
- ISSN
- 0049-1241
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1177/00491241211067508
- Publication date
- 2022
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506014 Comparative politics
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Social Sciences (miscellaneous), Sociology and Political Science
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/365b33f9-03fa-44b6-9bdf-a2388413a716