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
Knowing More from Less: How the Information Environment Increases Knowledge of Party Positions
- Author(s)
- Susan Banducci, Heiko Giebler, Sylvia Kritzinger
- Abstract
Access to information is a hallmark of democracy, and democracy demands an informed citizenry. Knowledge of party positions is necessary for voters so that electoral choices reflect preferences, allowing voters to hold elected officials accountable for policy performance. Whereas most vote choice models assume that parties perfectly transmit positions, citizens in fact obtain political information via the news media, and this news coverage can be biased in terms of salience - which leads to asymmetric information. This study examines how information asymmetries in news coverage of parties influence knowledge about political party positions. It finds that the availability of information in the news media about a party increases knowledge about its position, and that party information in non-quality news reduces the knowledge gap more than information in quality news.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- External organisation(s)
- Center for Civil Society Research, University of Exeter
- Journal
- British Journal of Political Science
- Volume
- 47
- Pages
- 571-588
- No. of pages
- 18
- ISSN
- 0007-1234
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123415000204
- Publication date
- 08-2015
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506012 Political systems
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Sociology and Political Science
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/a34b1023-7bb3-4b0f-810b-882de1665b76