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
Explaining EU Policy Implementation across Countries
- Author(s)
- Gerda Falkner
- Abstract
The project group on "New Governance and Social Europe" (http://www.mpifg.de/socialeurope) studied 90 cases of implementation performance, related to six labour law Directives and 15 member states. We derived a large number of hypotheses as to when compliance or non-compliance with EU law should be expected from the different literatures on implementation theory and on "Europeanisation", and we formulated a couple of fresh hypotheses (see Chapters 2 and 14 of our book forthcoming with CUP). However, an untidy overall picture emerged at the end of this exercise: no causal arrow presupposed by existing theories or by our own theoretical considerations seemed either necessary or sufficient in practice across the 90 cases. We then followed the methodological recommendations of the "grounded theory" school to work on the theoretical and empirical levels repeatedly and in turn in order to allow fresh insights from each field to improve our work in the other. We thus went back to the information on each country that we had derived from our interviews and stopped simply testing the prevailing hypotheses against our cases. When re-focussing on the broader knowledge about the countries we had gained in the interviews, we finally discovered three clusters of countries, each showing a specific typical pattern of reacting to EU-induced reform requirements. In fact, some EU member states displayed quite a regular pattern of compliance or non-compliance, regardless of how the specific provisions actually matched the relevant national policy legacies and governmental ideologies. We discerned three ideal-typical patterns of how member states handle the duty of complying with EU law, three different "worlds of compliance" within the EU15: a "world of law observance", a "world of domestic politics", and a "world of neglect". The specific results of particular examples of (non-)compliance tend to depend on different factors within each of the various worlds: the compliance cultures in the field can explain most cases in the worlds of law observance and neglect, while in the world of domestic politics the specific fit with domestic political preferences in each case plays a much larger role. These "worlds" are not necessarily visible if we only look at the overall implementation performance of member states. In contrast, our argument is that similar implementation records may be due to completely different factors in different groups of countries. We also do not claim that the categorisation of "three worlds of compliance" is able to predict individual cases of implementation in the member states. However, we feel confident that it does cover the typical patterns of how member states deal with their duty to comply with EU Directives – definitely in the area of social policy, but probably even far beyond that.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- Publication date
- 2005
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506004 European integration
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/3d3fbb8a-55e4-48aa-a2a3-7be74ea9e9d5