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
Prime Minister Powers and Reform Productivity across Western European Countries
- Author(s)
- Wolfgang C. Müller, Daniel Strobl, Hanna Bäck, Mariyana Angelova
- Abstract
This paper analyzes the role of prime ministers in policy-making in multiparty governments. We explore the role of constitutional prime minister powers in the reform productivity of governments. In particular, we take into account various prime ministerial powers, including the right to appoint and dismiss ministers, allocate portfolios and assign ministers’ responsibilities, issue binding instructions to their ministers, and control the cabinet agenda. We propose a novel approach to capture the impact of prime ministers on governmental reform productivity, where we investigate the impact of ideological alternation of prime ministers on the number of introduced reforms. We suggest that, if prime ministers are influential, then greater ideological discrepancy between the prime minister party in the current and the previous cabinets should result in greater government reform productivity. We evaluate our theoretical expectations using an original data set of economic reform measures introduced in 11 Western European countries (1985–2005), based on a coding of more than 1,000 periodical country reports issued by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and the OECD. Our findings suggest that prime minister parties have greater impact on government reform productivity when the prime minister has more constitutional powers.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- Publication date
- 11-2019
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506014 Comparative politics
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/3c99bbeb-0913-40f9-aa02-7aec6c6076f1