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
Sentiment analysis of political communication
- Author(s)
- Martin Haselmayer, Marcelo Jenny
- Abstract
Sentiment is important in studies of news values, public opinion, negative campaigning or political polarization and an explosive expansion of digital textual data and fast progress in automated text analysis provide vast opportunities for innovative social science research. Unfortunately, tools currently available for automated sentiment analysis are mostly restricted to English texts and require considerable contextual adaption to produce valid results. We present a procedure for collecting fine-grained sentiment scores through crowdcoding to build a negative sentiment dictionary in a language and for a domain of choice. The dictionary enables the analysis of large text corpora that resource-intensive hand-coding struggles to cope with. We calculate the tonality of sentences from dictionary words and we validate these estimates with results from manual coding. The results show that the crowdbased dictionary provides efficient and valid measurement of sentiment. Empirical examples illustrate its use by analyzing the tonality of party statements and media reports.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- Journal
- Quality & Quantity
- Volume
- 51
- Pages
- 2623–2646
- No. of pages
- 24
- ISSN
- 0033-5177
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-016-0412-4
- Publication date
- 09-2016
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 508008 Media analysis
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Social Sciences, Statistics and Probability
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/abb7a7b4-b312-4d75-a99e-fd5a000f66d3