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
Coalition Bargaining Time and Governments’ Policy-Making Productivity
- Author(s)
- Hanna Bäck, Matthew Bergman, Wolfgang C. Müller
- Abstract
What is the purpose of lengthy negotiations when a coalition government forms? Do they make a difference in coalition policy-making? Negotiations that produce policy agreements between coalition partners have been suggested to strengthen the capacity of coalition governments to make policy reforms. We argue that bargaining time, regardless if it results in a written policy agreement or not, is an investment in future government reform productivity. Longer negotiation periods indicate that the bargaining parties have negotiated deals over conflicting policy issues and have allowed parties to build trust between them and gain support for future policies
within the party organization, promoting reform productivity. Further, we expect that longer negotiation periods can mitigate problems of policy conflict within cabinets, thereby resulting in higher reform productivity. We evaluate our theoretical expectations using a data set on economic reform measures introduced in 10 Western European countries (1978–2017), based on a coding of more than 1000 periodical country reports issued by the Economist Intelligence Unit and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The results show support for our expectations, demonstrating that economic reform productivity is higher in coalition governments that have bargained for a longer time when forming. We also find support for the claim that bargaining time mitigates the negative effect of intra-cabinet ideological conflict on reform productivity.- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- Journal
- European Journal of Political Research
- Volume
- 63
- Pages
- 1263–1285
- No. of pages
- 23
- ISSN
- 0304-4130
- Publication date
- 10-2024
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506014 Comparative politics
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Political Science and International Relations, General Health Professions
- Sustainable Development Goals
- SDG 9 - Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/8a7d9574-6473-4cc9-8554-508cd52e4e87