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
Electoral strategies in multilevel systems: the effect of national politics on regional elections
- Author(s)
- Martin Gross, Svenja Krauss, Katrin Praprotnik
- Abstract
Elections are at the heart of representative democracies. Whereas the study of national elections is a prominent field in comparative politics, we still know little about subnational political actors’ behaviour. We seek to close this gap by applying a dictionary coding approach to analyse parties’ issue-based content of 743 subnational manifestos in Austria and Germany. We show that subnational parties emphasize regional topics less if regional elections happen close to national elections but focus more on both regional and mixed topics if their national party organization is in government. This has important implications for electoral competition in multilevel systems.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- External organisation(s)
- Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz
- Journal
- Regional Studies
- Volume
- 57
- Pages
- 844-856
- No. of pages
- 13
- ISSN
- 0034-3404
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2022.2107193
- Publication date
- 2022
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506014 Comparative politics
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Environmental Science, General Social Sciences
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/8267fd88-2dfd-4f4a-9015-21d59b7d169f