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
Can We Counteract Hate?
- Author(s)
- Svenja Schäfer, Isabella Rebasso, Ming Manuel Boyer, Anna Maria Planitzer
- Abstract
Hate speech can increase stereotyped thinking and social distancing in a society. However, there is still a lack of variety in the social groups under study and research into possible solutions to the problem. Thus, our aim is to (1) study effects of hate speech against Chinese people and transgender people and (2) to investigate if counter speech can offset the detrimental effects of hate speech. We conducted a pre-registered online experiment with a 2 × 3 between-subject design, varying the attacked group (Chinese people/transgender people) and the type of comments (neutral/hate speech/hate speech and counter speech) for an Austrian sample (n = 1285). Findings reveal no effect of hate speech on the dependent variables, indicating that citizens might not be as vulnerable to hate speech after all. However, counter speech has a polarizing effect: attitudinal gaps and differences for social distancing increase between left-wing and right-wing participants if hate speech is countered.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Communication, Department of Political Science, Department of Government
- Journal
- Communication Research (CR)
- Volume
- 51
- Pages
- 553-579
- No. of pages
- 27
- ISSN
- 0093-6502
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1177/00936502231201091
- Publication date
- 09-2023
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 508012 Media impact studies
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Communication, Language and Linguistics, Linguistics and Language
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/b478db11-336f-4c9a-9afa-b61514cb3d00