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 Homogeneity of West Europan Party Families: The Radical Right in Comparative Perspective
- Author(s)
- Laurenz Ennser-Jedenastik
- Abstract
Common concepts for the classification of parties into families (origins, transnational links, ideology, name) suggest that the radical right should be less homogeneous than most other party families in Western Europe: their comparatively diverse origins, disputed ideological core features, as well as the lack of stable transnational cooperation and the absence of an agreed-upon label support this reasoning. The article uses expert survey data on six policy dimensions to assess the homogeneity of the radical right in comparison with the green, social democratic, liberal and conservative/Christian democratic party families. Analysing a set of 94 parties from 17 West European countries it is found (1) that party families on the left are more homogeneous than those on the right, and (2) that the party family of the radical right exhibits a degree of policy homogeneity similar to the conservatives and Christian democrats, while being considerably more homogeneous than the liberal party family.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- Journal
- Party Politics
- Volume
- 18
- Pages
- 151-171
- No. of pages
- 21
- ISSN
- 1354-0688
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1177/1354068810382936
- Publication date
- 2012
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506014 Comparative politics
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/5e438e85-a2ff-44b8-a29c-bd2d284c6826