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
SS-Unterscharführer Adolf Storms and the massacre of Hungarian-Jews forced labourers in Deutsch Schützen
- Author(s)
- Walter Manoschek
- Abstract
Adolf Storms was not hard to find in the summer of 2008. He was listed in the German telephone book. The former SSUnterscharführer, who had been a member of the Waffen-SS Panzer Division Wiking, was accused, along with two other SS men, of having shot to death at least fifty-seven Hungarian-Jewish forced labourers on 29 March 1945 in Deutsch Schützen, a village close to the Austrian-Hungarian border. Immediately after that massacre, he allegedly executed a Jew–a man, name unknown, who could not walk any further–by shooting him from behind. Adolf Storms had lived in Duisburg under his true name since the late 1940s. In 2008, the author interviewed Storms and two Hitler Jugend (HJ) leaders who also took part in this crime, and three Jews who survived the massacre. In 2009, Storms was charged with murder and as an accessory to murder in Düsseldorf. In June 2010, shortly before the decision for the trial to commence, he died at the age of ninety-one. This case study scrutinizes the intersection of ideology, Nazi morality, motivation and situational factors in perpetrating massacres. It also analyses how the judicial system in Austria dealt with this crime.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- Journal
- Journal of Genocide Research
- Volume
- 19
- Pages
- 361-381
- No. of pages
- 21
- ISSN
- 1462-3528
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2017.1340866
- Publication date
- 07-2017
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506010 Policy analysis, 601022 Contemporary history
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Law, History, Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/8d1b3e64-a69a-4294-a8da-f009d121cc96