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.
Political Institutions
Institutions play a key role in political systems, as they define the framework conditions for political decisions...
Political Representation
Political representation describes the institutional and social processes and practices that connect citizens and voters to...
Party Competition
Party competition is an essential component of democratic systems and describes the competition between political parties for votes...
Infrastructural Projects
Infrastructural projects are an essential component of scientific research, as they create the basis for long-term data collection...
Political Behaviour
Political behaviour deals with the individual and collective attitudes and actions of citizens in a political context...
Cooperations
Cooperations are a central component of scientific research, as they promote the exchange of knowledge, resources and...
Publications
Government alternation and proximity voting
- Author(s)
- Carolina Plescia, Francesco Zucchini
- Abstract
A landmark finding in recent research on electoral behaviour is that voters anticipate the postelection bargaining process among potential members of the governing coalition, and that these anticipated policy agreements inform their vote choice. In this article, this finding is qualified by arguing, and then showing empirically, that when the expected policy change after the elections is marginal or non-existent, ceteris paribus, 'simple' proximity voting should prevail. The argument is tested by using two different but complementary research strategies applied to an individual-level data set constructed from electoral surveys in 28 countries over a 20-year period, and two recent national surveys in which respondents were directly asked to predict the potential coalition government after the elections. Both strategies provide support for the hypothesis and have important implications for the understanding of the consequences of government alternation on voting behaviour and political representation more broadly. Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2021.1994843 .
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- External organisation(s)
- Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca
- Journal
- West European Politics
- Volume
- 46
- Pages
- 148-172
- No. of pages
- 25
- ISSN
- 0140-2382
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2021.1994843
- Publication date
- 11-2021
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506014 Comparative politics, 506013 Political theory
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Political Science and International Relations
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/38e65f7e-a7cb-416e-80d1-e7a8d3ebb23b