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
Intra-Party Diversity and Ministerial Selection in Coalition Governments. A Comparative Analysis of Four Western European Countries
- Author(s)
- Hanna Bäck, Marc Debus, Wolfgang Claudius Müller
- Abstract
This study focuses on the allocation of politicians to cabinet offices in different
institutional settings. We argue that cabinet ministers are appointed with the aim of minimizing the policy distance to the most important principal, which could be the Prime Minister, the coalition, or the individual parties that form the coalition. We advance this field of research by performing a comparative analysis of different coalition systems. We evaluate our hypotheses by estimating the policy positions of Austrian, German and Swedish politicians on the basis of a computerized content analysis of their speeches given in parliament. The results provide support for our argument and show that the policy distance towards the dominant principal is important for becoming a cabinet member.- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- External organisation(s)
- Lund University, Universität Mannheim
- Journal
- Public Choice
- Volume
- 166
- Pages
- 355–378
- ISSN
- 0048-5829
- Publication date
- 04-2016
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506001 General theory of the state
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Sociology and Political Science
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/affb8ef3-4cf5-4251-933b-2eed072d1d4b