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
New Directions in Quantitative Measures of Populism
- Author(s)
- Matthew Bergman
- Abstract
Operationalizing populism through quantitative measures allows for (1) a validation of these classifications; (2) critical cross-national analysis; and (3) diachronic comparisons. Each of the approaches to populism discussed in this volume and others potentially provide a locus for which populism could be measured. This chapter surveys approaches that have developed scales to measure how much “populism” is present in a party, among representatives, in the public, and captured in political discourse. Such objective measures allow for confirmation or refutation of the presence of populism and the shedding of normative biases associated with this analytical term (Aslanidis, 2017). These measures also attempt to isolate populism from related concepts such as nationalism, authoritarianism, or protest. The following sections survey the current breadth of these measures’ construction, identifies which types of questions can be answered with such operationalizations, and guides a critical reader through further advances attainable through the usage of quantitative methodology. Key to such advances is the ability to classify political actors as more or less populist.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- Pages
- 236-247
- No. of pages
- 12
- Publication date
- 2020
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506014 Comparative politics
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/a53f2e80-f936-4479-8628-e50b467b0c85