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
Dictionary-based sentiment analysis with crowdcoding
- Author(s)
- Martin Haselmayer, Marcelo Jenny
- Abstract
Negativity is an important dimension in the social sciences: e.g. in the study of news values, negative campaigning or political polarization. Our paper presents a supervised procedure for fine-grained negative sentiment analysis at the sentence level. We develop a dictionary of negative valued political vocabulary and establish the dictionary’s terms’ sentiment strength through crowdcoding. Tonality for new sentences is computed from the dictionary words’ sentiment ratings. We validate these automatic sentiment estimates with results from manual expert coding. The procedure can be easily implemented for various contexts and languages. Our empirical applications analyze the tonality of political statements and media reports.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government, Department of Communication
- No. of pages
- 22
- Publication date
- 06-2015
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 508008 Media analysis, 506008 Conflict research
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/714acd44-5642-4514-b5c1-3c7b30612cc5