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
Multidimensional Representation
- Author(s)
- Fabio Wolkenstein, Christopher Wratil
- Abstract
The study of representation is a major research field in quantitative political science. Since the early 2000s, it has been accompanied by a range of important conceptual innovations by political theorists working on the topic. Yet, although many quantitative scholars are familiar with the conceptual literature, even the most complex quantitative studies eschew engaging with the “new wave” of more sophisticated concepts of representation that theorists have developed. We discuss what we take to be the main reasons for this gap between theory and empirics, and present four novel conceptions of representation that are both sensitive to theorists’ conceptual impulses and operationalizable for quantitative scholars. In doing so, we advance an alternative research agenda on representation that moves significantly beyond the status quo of the field.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Political Science, Department of Government
- Journal
- American Journal of Political Science
- Volume
- 65
- Pages
- 862-876
- No. of pages
- 15
- ISSN
- 0092-5853
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12563
- Publication date
- 10-2021
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506014 Comparative politics
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/8402d156-10a6-45a0-af4c-d84be8194973