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.
Political Institutions
Institutions play a key role in political systems, as they define the framework conditions for political decisions...
Political Representation
Political representation describes the institutional and social processes and practices that connect citizens and voters to...
Party Competition
Party competition is an essential component of democratic systems and describes the competition between political parties for votes...
Infrastructural Projects
Infrastructural projects are an essential component of scientific research, as they create the basis for long-term data collection...
Political Behaviour
Political behaviour deals with the individual and collective attitudes and actions of citizens in a political context...
Cooperations
Cooperations are a central component of scientific research, as they promote the exchange of knowledge, resources and...
Publications
How Much Tailoring Is too Much? Voter Backlash on Highly Tailored Campaign Messages
- Author(s)
- Christina Gahn
- Abstract
Findings on whether voters like or dislike targeted campaign messages have been contradictory. I argue that voters react differently depending on how precisely the targeted messages are tailored to them, and tailoring can potentially become “too much.” I corroborate this claim with the results of a factorial survey experiment among a representative sample of the German voting population (N = 3,217), which was conducted in the summer of 2021. Taking a novel approach, I measured the effects of close political targeting by asking respondents to rate campaign messages with varying degrees of tailoring. The analysis revealed a backlash effect, which is especially pronounced by men getting ads tailored to their gender. Voters appreciate messages that are moderately tailored to them but dislike highly tailored messages. This holds both for implicitly tailored messages and those that explicitly acknowledge the use of personal data. These results indicate that voters seem to recognize excessively tailored messages and manipulating them is difficult. These findings have important implications for the modern election campaigning’s effects on political behavior and its regulation.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- Journal
- The International Journal of Press/Politics
- ISSN
- 1940-1612
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1177/19401612241263192
- Publication date
- 07-2024
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506014 Comparative politics, 508020 Political communication
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Communication, Sociology and Political Science
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/678d1ea3-aef3-457b-86a0-5cf91252fbbc