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
The nonideological component of coalition preferences
- Author(s)
- Dominic Nyhuis, Carolina Plescia
- Abstract
Recent research on political attitudes has emphasized that coalition preferences determine electoral choices, prompting scholars to investigate the sources of coalition preferences. While it is not surprising that coalition preferences are strongly informed by spatial considerations, several studies have drawn attention to additional nonideological factors. Relying on this insight, the present study aims to systematically investigate the nonideological or valence component of coalition preferences. In order to decompose attitudes into their principal ideological and nonideological components, we apply a Bayesian unfolding model to coalition sympathy ratings. We find that coalitions differ strongly with regard to their valence component. This surplus cannot be reconstructed as a linear combination of the coalitions' constituent party valences and is predominantly structured by campaign valence.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- External organisation(s)
- Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main
- Journal
- Party Politics
- Volume
- 24
- Pages
- 686-697
- No. of pages
- 12
- ISSN
- 1354-0688
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1177/1354068817690933
- Publication date
- 02-2017
- 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/87576408-eb60-492f-8764-9672cdeda68c