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
Misinformedness about the European Union and the Preference to Vote to Leave or Remain
- Author(s)
- Julia Partheymüller, Carolina Plescia, Sylvia Kritzinger
- Abstract
European politicians have become increasingly concerned about the possible distorting effects of citizens not only being uninformed, but systematically misinformed about the European Union (EU). Against this background, this study assesses the role of EU knowledge in shaping the preference to vote to leave or remain in a (hypothetical) referendum on EU membership using cross-national survey data that were collected simultaneously in eight EU countries during the run-up to the 2019 EP elections. The surveys included a newly designed item battery of EU knowledge capturing both the accuracy as well as confidence in knowledge of the respondents. The results show that misinformedness is associated with a preference to leave the EU, the uninformed citizens tend to be undecided or not intending to vote, while the well-informed prefer to remain. Overall, our findings contribute to the ongoing debates about the role of misinformation in politics.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- Journal
- Journal of Common Market Studies
- Volume
- 60
- Pages
- 1449-1469
- No. of pages
- 21
- ISSN
- 0021-9886
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.13316
- Publication date
- 09-2022
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 504007 Empirical social research, 506004 European integration
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Economics and Econometrics, General Business,Management and Accounting, Political Science and International Relations, Business and International Management
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/9b31d95f-7bf4-45b9-8942-77af02c59306