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
On the Effects of Mixed-Member Systems
- Author(s)
- Theresa Kernecker, Marcelo Jenny
- Abstract
Adoption of mixed-member electoral systems constitutes one of the major electoral reform trends of the last decades. In Latin America Bolivia and Mexico, among others, currently employ a mixed-member electoral system. Bolivia modified a proportional electoral system by adding a majoritarian tier in the 1990s. Mexico’s transition to competitive electoral democracy entailed an electoral system change by adding a new proportional tier in the 1980s. The theory on electoral system effects stipulates that a concurrent use of different electoral formulas creates diverging impacts on the calculus of both voters and legislators. Advocates of majoritarian formulas claim that electing legislators in single member districts enforces a close relationship between district voters and their representatives. We analyze whether legislators elected under different rules in these two countries have different role orientations in the post-reform period. Using survey data of legislators we find that legislators elected in single member districts were indeed more likely to focus on their constituents than colleagues elected under proportional representation.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- Publication date
- 2014
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506001 General theory of the state
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/b9be38a0-df32-4394-9669-f00ad46358a5