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
Extending the Coalition Life-cycle Approach to Central Eastern Europe – An Introduction
- Author(s)
- Wolfgang C. Müller, Torbjörn Bergman, Gabriella Ilonszki
- Abstract
This chapter makes the case for studying coalition politics in Central Eastern Europe (CEE). A focus on CEE not only fills a research gap in terms of geographic coverage but also opens up the opportunity of out-of-sample theory testing, mitigating the notorious large-p-small-N problem in coalition research, and extending the theoretical framework by incorporating explanatory factors particularly relevant in CEE countries. Within the coalition life-cycle coalition governance – its central stage between coalition formation and termination – is the stage which constitutes the greatest lacuna in coalition research.
The main problem of coalition governance is the multi-party nature of governments, with the coalition parties often having conflicting policy preferences, desiring the same offices as their partners, and competing with each other in the next elections. This constellation may lead to conflict within and between the coalition parties, cabinet instability, and policy stalemate. Coalition buildes can contain these dangers by choosing the right partners, dividing the spoils wisely, and by employing various mechanisms to manage intra-party politics and, in particular, inter-party relations (giving credibility to commitments, providing mutual information, and making decisions jointly). The resulting modes of coalition governance take three ideal-typical forms: the Ministerial Government Model, the Coalition Compromise Model, and the Dominant Prime Minister Model.
Turning to the coalition-cycle in Central Eastern Europe, the chapter explains how the country chapters are organized, which research questions they ask, and how this relates to the extant literature on CEE coalition politics. The chapter concludes with highlighting some of the books’ main findings.- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- External organisation(s)
- Umeå University, Corvinus University of Budapest
- Pages
- 1–59
- No. of pages
- 59
- Publication date
- 01-2019
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506012 Political systems
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Social Sciences
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/b75571a1-6717-462a-b366-b9cf88bdd616