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
Polarized Politics
- Author(s)
- Katharina Gabriela Pfaff, Thomas Plümper, Eric Neumayer
- Abstract
Protest against containment policies in U.S. states is fueled by two drivers: the stringency of containment policies and the partisan control over the governorship and legislatures in each state. In our analysis of the period from March 2020 to March 2022, we find more protest events in states fully controlled by Democrats than in Republican controlled states both in a sample consisting of all states and a balanced sample in which we constrain observations to those red and blue states with on average similarly stringent containment policies. Protest was therefore politicized, and we find that partisanship exerts a roughly equal substantive effect on the number of protest events as the stringency of containment policies. If we assume no direct effect of partisanship on protest but allow for causal heterogeneity along partisan lines in the effect of containment policies, we find that the same increase in the stringency of policies evokes a stronger protest response in blue states than in red states.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- External organisation(s)
- Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien (WU), London School of Economics and Political Science
- Journal
- Political Science Quarterly
- Volume
- 138
- Pages
- 23-46
- No. of pages
- 24
- ISSN
- 0032-3195
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1093/psquar/qqac002
- Publication date
- 2023
- 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/8d1817d0-ea93-4a19-8e65-b8dcb4247a93