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
Populist ideas on social media
- Author(s)
- Johann Gründl
- Abstract
This article presents a dictionary-based measurement of populist communication that reaches citizens directly through social media in German. The studied populist messages reflect ideational definitions of populism. Thus, populist messages appeal to the people, dismiss the elites as appalling, or highlight the people’s right to unfettered rule. Despite German-speaking countries offering a variety of populist parties, existing automated approaches are rarely applicable to German texts. Furthermore, they are not tailored to social media and often focus only on anti-elitism. I vastly improved existing dictionaries by analyzing populist ideology in its entirety, including people-centrism and the demand for people’s sovereignty. The article showed how known populist parties in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland spread these messages to a great extent on social media. Furthermore, I was able to highlight intra-party differences. Finally, the article discusses different aspects of validity and shows that the proposed approach offers high convergent validity and split-half reliability.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- Journal
- New Media & Society
- Volume
- 24
- Pages
- 1481-1499
- No. of pages
- 19
- ISSN
- 1461-4448
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820976970
- Publication date
- 06-2022
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506012 Political systems, 506014 Comparative politics, 504007 Empirical social research, 508020 Political communication
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Communication, Sociology and Political Science
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/a8d4962b-8b91-4dea-a141-1555449ecbb0