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

Populism and Candidate Support in the US: The Effects of “Thin” and “Host” Ideology

Author(s)
Bruno Castanho Silva, Fabian Guy Neuner, Christopher Wratil
Abstract

Much of the contemporary literature on populism focuses on its status as a “thin” ideology comprising three key components: people-centrism, anti-elitism, and anti-pluralism. Populist politicians pair this “thin” ideology with extreme positions on policy issues such as immigration or taxation (referred to as “host” or “thick” ideologies). A recent study using German samples leveraged conjoint experiments to disentangle the effects of these appeals on vote choice. The results not only showed that extreme host-ideological positions mattered more than so-called “thin” populist appeals, but also that effects of populist appeals were nearly identical among populist and non-populist voters. Our replication in the US context reaffirms both the importance of host-ideological positions and the lack of heterogeneous effects by voters’ “thin” populist attitudes. Furthermore, by uncovering some divergence from the German case (e.g. anti-elite appeals trumping people-centric appeals), we highlight the need to experimentally examine the effects of populism’s constituent components across contexts.

Organisation(s)
Department of Government
External organisation(s)
Universität zu Köln, Arizona State University
Journal
Journal of Experimental Political Science
Volume
10
Pages
438-447
No. of pages
10
ISSN
2052-2630
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1017/XPS.2022.9
Publication date
06-2022
Peer reviewed
Yes
Austrian Fields of Science 2012
506014 Comparative politics
Keywords
ASJC Scopus subject areas
Sociology and Political Science
Sustainable Development Goals
SDG 10 - Reduced Inequalities
Portal url
https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/ad09d102-2a98-46ea-b892-81146166a9b2