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
Labour market policies and support for populist radical right parties: the role of nostalgic producerism, occupational risk, and feedback effects
- Author(s)
- Matthew E. Bergman
- Abstract
One of the growing constituencies of populist movements has been those facing labour market risks. These individuals are hypothesized to be the most likely to find themselves in need of government protection or service provision as their occupations face challenges from abroad through global competition, domestically through competition from immigrant labour, or technologically from automation. Nations, however, vary in how their populations experience such risks. Some nations expend greater effort on job placement or retraining programmes. Others provide legislative protections for workers that shield them from the potential of lost employment. Using data from the latest three rounds of the European Social Survey, this paper seeks to examine how individual-level preferences towards populist radical right parties are mediated by the visibility/size of contemporary county-level efforts to ameliorate labour market risk in a sample of 14 West European nations. The analysis distinguishes whether occupational characteristics and/or government policies have a differential impact on supporting populist radical right parties. While labour market policies might be designed to mitigate labour market risk, for many individuals, they have the effect of intensifying support for populist parties.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- Journal
- European Political Science Review
- Volume
- 14
- Pages
- 520-543
- No. of pages
- 24
- ISSN
- 1755-7739
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1017/S175577392200025X
- Publication date
- 07-2022
- 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
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/a88ef812-f9b9-4fb1-a95f-e9748930971e