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
Fighting for attention: Media coverage of negative campaign messages
- Author(s)
- Martin Haselmayer, Thomas Meyer, Markus Wagner
- Abstract
The article studies whether and how negative campaigning is a successful strategy for attaining media attention. It combines extensive content analyses of party and news texts with public opinion surveys to study the success of individual press releases in making the news. The empirical analysis draws on 1496 party press releases and 6512 news reports in all national media outlets during the final 6 weeks of Austria's 2013 general election campaign. We find that negative campaigning is a successful strategy to attract the attention of journalists and editors. It is particularly relevant for rank-and-file politicians, who lack the intrinsic news value of high public or party office, and for messages that focus on a rival's best issues. These findings have broader implications for understanding party strategies and 'negativity bias' in the news.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- Journal
- Party Politics
- Volume
- 25
- Pages
- 412-423
- No. of pages
- 12
- ISSN
- 1354-0688
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1177/1354068817724174
- Publication date
- 08-2017
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506014 Comparative politics
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Sociology and Political Science
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/7ab7ae21-c60e-4392-9d10-4e167e1b050f