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
The duration of government formation processes in Europe
- Author(s)
- Alejandro Ecker, Thomas Meyer
- Abstract
Although many studies analyse government formation and termination, there is only scant attention to the duration of government formation processes. The few existing studies focus on the empirical evidence of parliamentary democracies in Western Europe until 1998. We present a new data set on 297 government formation processes in 27 European countries that allows us to test models explaining delays in the government formation process developed in Western Europe using new data from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Our results suggest that these models perform much better in the Western European heartland of coalition studies than in the context of CEE. We highlight the implications of these findings and discuss potential avenues for future research.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- Journal
- Research & Politics
- Volume
- 2
- No. of pages
- 9
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1177/2053168015622796
- Publication date
- 2015
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506014 Comparative politics
- 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/a45bc011-d1ac-4626-9ec2-ab793b1f3e96