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
Social democracy transformed? Party change and union ties
- Author(s)
- Mario Tobias Taschwer, Laurenz Ennser-Jedenastik, Verena Reidinger
- Abstract
Social democratic parties have undergone a transformative ideological and electoral shift. But how has this affected their alliance with trade unions in terms of personal ties? This article hypothesises that Social democratic parties appoint fewer union-linked ministers as they become more economically centrist and less dependent on working-class voters. However, institutions that stabilise party–union relations should moderate these effects (statutory linkages, high union density, or union involvement in policymaking). Data on 2,600 ministerial appointments in Western Europe show that there is no direct relationship between trade unionist appointments and changes in party electorates or party ideology. However, electoral change is correlated with appointment patterns when institutional stabilisers are weak. Thus, social democrats weaken their elite ties to unions in response to the middle-class shift in their electorates, but only when the institutional context is unfavourable for the party-union relationship.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- External organisation(s)
- Universität Zürich (UZH)
- Journal
- West European Politics
- ISSN
- 0140-2382
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2024.2367386
- Publication date
- 2024
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506014 Comparative politics
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Political Science and International Relations
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/be95e15b-6bae-4292-991e-ff7d4fb7dbf9