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
Polarizing Cues in Austria and Germany
- Author(s)
- Nico Büttner, Mariyana Angelova
- Abstract
This work studies social polarization in Germany and Austria in a comparative perspective. Drawing on social identity theory and voters’ propensity to use party cues as heuristics, we propose a two-stage experiment, containing two short vignettes that present real-world policy positions with varying degrees of issue salience but overall party consensus. We fielded our survey questions for Austria through the Platform für Umfragen, Methoden and empirische Analyses (PUMA) at the University of Vienna and for Germany through the German Internet Panel at the University of Mannheim.
Respondents in both survey questionnaires were randomly assigned to one out of six groups. Group 0 contains no additional information about party support of the presented policies (control group), whereas the remaining groups receive additional but selective information about the support of one party, which is currently represented in the Austrian National Assembly (treatment groups) and the German Bundestag. In all scenarios, the issue position is held constant. We expect that respondents will bring their approval of the respective policies into alignment with their attitudes towards the randomly assigned party in the vignettes. Drawing on theoretical explanations for voters’ uses of heuristics, we hypothesize that respondents polarize more strongly for low salient and less emotional polices. Based on the literature from political psychology, we further expect that respondents with higher political knowledge and political interest are more prone to socially polarize.- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- Pages
- 1
- No. of pages
- 24
- Publication date
- 2018
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506014 Comparative politics
- Keywords
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/b865589c-9152-46f4-bd06-943be3707401