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
Stability of minority governments and the role of support agreements
- Author(s)
- Svenja Krauss, Maria Thürk
- Abstract
How does the minority status of a government influence cabinet duration? This article analyzes the influence of minority status on cabinet duration by differentiating between different types of minority governments. Minority governments are not in general less stable than majority ones but different types of minority governments have different effects on cabinet duration. The main theoretical argument is that substantive minority governments without support agreements are less stable than majority governments, while contract minority governments that rely on written support agreements with non-cabinet parties which secure majority support in parliament are as stable as majority ones. Drawing on survival analysis, the effect of different minority cabinet types on cabinet stability is tested for 471 cabinets in 30 countries from 1977 until 2019. The results show that only minority governments without support partnerships have a substantially higher risk of early government termination than majority cabinets. The findings of this analysis have important implications for the coalition theory and the evaluation of minority governments.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- External organisation(s)
- Universität Basel
- Journal
- West European Politics
- Volume
- 45
- Pages
- 767-792
- No. of pages
- 26
- ISSN
- 0140-2382
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2021.1890455
- Publication date
- 2021
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506014 Comparative politics
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Political Science and International Relations
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/84c0ad13-2b25-490a-8eb5-a535736fb154