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
The Party Politicization of Administrative Elites in the Netherlands
- Author(s)
- Laurenz Ennser-Jedenastik
- Abstract
This paper explores four potential motivations for the party politicization of the senior civil service: ideological agreement, coalition governance, party family issue priorities, and consociational representation. Using data on the party affiliation of 134 secretaries-general (SGs) serving in the Dutch ministerial bureaucracy between 1945 and 2013, it examines the partisan logic of appointment patterns among senior civil servants in the Netherlands. Overall levels of politicization are very high (almost 70 percent of all SGs have a discernible party affiliation), with a strong increase between 1970 and 1990 and a slight drop-off during the past decades. The appointment patterns suggest that the main drivers behind the party politicization of the Dutch elite bureaucracy are the demand for ideological agreement and a consociational quest for the representation of the 'pillar parties' in the senior civil service.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- Journal
- Acta Politica: international journal of political science
- Volume
- 51
- Pages
- 451-471
- No. of pages
- 21
- ISSN
- 0001-6810
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1057/s41269-016-0005-1
- Publication date
- 10-2016
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506014 Comparative politics
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Political Science and International Relations
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/f45ca01a-846f-491b-bf6a-363ed647891b