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 closer, the better – How perceived ideological proximity between parties affects the emergence of coalition preferences
- Author(s)
- L. Constantin Wurthmann, Svenja Krauss
- Abstract
While coalition governments have been studied extensively, there remains a lack of understanding of how coalition preferences emerge and what factors are the most influential. Utilising coalition formation theories, this study posits that voters tend to prefer coalitions with a narrower range of ideological differences between 1.) the parties involved and 2.) between the voter and the party perceived to have the greatest ideological distance from the individual. Previous studies have mainly concentrated on a general left-right ideological dimension or specific issue dimensions, despite the fact that some of the countries analysed are characterized by a two-dimensional political space. Using Germany as a case study that exemplifies this inherent two-dimensionality, this analysis adopts a nuanced approach by employing the calculation of Euclidean distance based on socio-economic and socio-cultural measures. This approach aims to explain the formation of coalition preferences leading up to the federal election in 2021. Our results show how strongly the perceived ideological distance of parties contributes to developing preferences for a specific coalition option, even when controlling for party evaluation and socio-demographics. For this reason, they have important implications for the understanding of the emergence of coalition preferences and party competition.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- External organisation(s)
- GESIS – Leibniz-Institut für Sozialwissenschaften
- Journal
- Political Research Exchange
- Volume
- 6
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1080/2474736X.2024.2303130
- Publication date
- 2024
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506014 Comparative politics
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Political Science and International Relations
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/a95d3b8c-ef07-4051-85ba-4565ddee4c01