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
Parties' issue strategies on the drawing board
- Author(s)
- Carolina Plescia, Sylvia Kritzinger, Patricia Oberluggauer
- Abstract
Parties may rely on different issue agendas when tailoring their electoral campaigns in an attempt to win elections. This paper compares two key party issue strategies to examine which one the victorious Austrian Peoples’ Party (ÖVP) relied on the most during the 2017 Austrian election campaign vis-à-vis its main competitors. These two key party strategies are the ‘riding-the-wave’ model, which posits that parties focus on issues that currently concern voters the most and the recent ‘issue-yield model’, which instead suggests that parties adopt strategic behaviour targeting all those issues with genuine opportunities for electoral expansion. It is found that, compared to the other main parties in the 2017 Austrian election campaign, the ÖVP was the one most clearly relying on the issue-yield approach. These results have important implications for our understanding of electoral campaigns, party’s exploitation of issue strategies, and voter representation beyond the Austrian case.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- Journal
- West European Politics
- Volume
- 43
- Pages
- 639-664
- No. of pages
- 26
- ISSN
- 0140-2382
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2019.1655965
- Publication date
- 2020
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506012 Political systems
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Political Science and International Relations
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/3da141f0-6a01-409d-aaff-009887b0bad2