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
Who Makes Policy? The Impact of Ministers on Reform Productivity in Coalition Governments
- Author(s)
- Hanna Bäck, Wolfgang C. Müller, Mariyana Angelova, Daniel Strobl
- Abstract
Can ministers in parliamentary democracies influence reform policy? This paper investigates the role of ministerial prerogatives for policy output, and asks under which circumstances the partisanship of the responsible minister influences reform-making in multiparty cabinets. In parliamentary democracies, ministerial posts give coalition partners policy discretion, which they can use to shape government policy in their allocated ministries to their party’s advantage. To evaluate the impact of ministers in coalition policy-making, we start from the general proposition that governing parties will introduce more reforms when the policy status quo is located further away from their ideological position. We thus hypothesize that an increased distance between the party policy position of a minister and the policy status quo leads to higher reform productivity in the policy area controlled by the minister. We also hypothesize that this effect is conditional on the institutional setting, and is stronger in systems with weak legislative institutions. We evaluate our hypotheses using a new data set of important socio-economic reform measures introduced in 11 Western European countries between 1985 and 2005, based on a manual coding of periodical country reports issued by the Economist Intelligence Unit. Our results reveal that ministers have an impact on reform- making in coalition governments, but mainly when legislative institutions are weak.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- External organisation(s)
- Lund University
- Pages
- 1
- No. of pages
- 34
- Publication date
- 2017
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506014 Comparative politics
- Keywords
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/8c8c0eaf-f70f-485c-bcc8-0f64dcdb6998