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
Coalition Conflict - a Remedy for Democratic Accountability?
- Author(s)
- Mariyana Angelova
- Abstract
Complex political systems, where besides the incumbent government other elected and non elected actors are involved in the decision-making process, blur the lines of pol- icy responsibility and jeopardize the electoral accountability of incumbent governments. While we know that on aggregate, voters in systems with blurred lines of responsibil- ity hold governments accountable to a lesser extend, we know surprisingly little why people in the same country assign different degrees of responsibility and punish and reward the incumbent government to a different extend. This paper focuses on parlia- mentary democracies with coalition governments and unveils one central factor which influences voters’ decision to judge the government and not other actors as more respon- sible. This factor is perceived level of conflict in coalition governments. I suggest that voters use signals of coalition conflict (which is an essential part of the political reality in multiparty governments) as a cognitive short-cut (heuristics) to infer government re- sponsibility and engage in more rigorous electoral accountability. I find strong empirical support for these arguments using unique survey data from Germany, which allows me to directly test decisions of responsibility attribution and electoral accountability given voters’ perceptions of the economic situation in Germany and their (dis-)satisfaction with government policies across 20 policy areas.- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- Pages
- 1
- No. of pages
- 47
- Publication date
- 2018
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506014 Comparative politics
- Keywords
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/3d727afb-d082-46d9-a717-eb6d37a4d545