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.
Political Institutions
Institutions play a key role in political systems, as they define the framework conditions for political decisions...
Political Representation
Political representation describes the institutional and social processes and practices that connect citizens and voters to...
Party Competition
Party competition is an essential component of democratic systems and describes the competition between political parties for votes...
Infrastructural Projects
Infrastructural projects are an essential component of scientific research, as they create the basis for long-term data collection...
Political Behaviour
Political behaviour deals with the individual and collective attitudes and actions of citizens in a political context...
Cooperations
Cooperations are a central component of scientific research, as they promote the exchange of knowledge, resources and...
Publications
Who tweets, and how freely?
- Author(s)
- Paul C. Bauer, Alejandro Ecker, Michael Imre, Camille Landesvatter, Sonja Malich
- Abstract
Twitter has become one of the primary platforms for politicians to interact with the public. Consequently, research into politicians’ Twitter usage has proliferated with attempts at measuring increasingly complex concepts such as ideology or policy attitudes. So far, many of these studies either implicitly or explicitly assume that politicians’ Twitter accounts are operated by politicians themselves and that politicians are free to present their “true” attitudes and positions. We conducted an elite survey in Germany and present evidence that these assumptions only partially hold true. In our sample, only around a third of Twitter accounts are operated by the corresponding politician alone. In our view, this is a conservative estimate and should further decrease as political elites’ social media strategies professionalize over the coming years. We also find that most politicians state that there are no party guidelines regarding Twitter and that their tweets are not checked by a central authority in the party. We discuss the implications of our findings for research on social media in general.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- External organisation(s)
- University of Heidelberg, Universität Mannheim, Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung der Bundesagentur für Arbeit
- Journal
- Research & Politics
- Volume
- 10
- Pages
- 1-4
- ISSN
- 2053-1680
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1177/20531680221144237
- Publication date
- 01-2023
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506002 E-government
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science, Public Administration
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/8f0b7f2f-3066-4cb3-925d-12ae8e6f542c