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
Government Rhetoric and the Representation of Public Opinion in International Negotiations
- Author(s)
- Christopher Wratil, Jens Wäckerle, Sven-Oliver Proksch
- Abstract
The role of domestic public opinion is an important topic in research on international negotiations, yet we know little about how exactly it manifests itself. We focus on government rhetoric during negotiations and develop a conceptual distinction between implicit and explicit manifestations of public opinion. Drawing on a database of video recordings of negotiations of the Council of the European Union and a quantitative text analysis of government speeches, we find that public opinion matters implicitly, with the exact pattern depending on governments’ stance toward the EU. Pro-EU governments are responsive to public opinion in their support for compromises and attempts to stall negotiations, whereas Euroskeptic governments tend to remain silent when confronted with a public positively disposed toward the EU. Our results show that although governments implicitly represent public opinion, they do not systematically invoke their voters explicitly, suggesting the public matters but in different ways than often assumed.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- External organisation(s)
- Universität zu Köln
- Journal
- American Political Science Review
- Volume
- 117
- Pages
- 1105-1122
- No. of pages
- 18
- ISSN
- 0003-0554
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055422001198
- Publication date
- 12-2022
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506007 International relations, 506004 European integration, 506014 Comparative politics
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/6aaad906-08f7-4a88-a0a0-39f72d2ab841