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
The Party Personnel Datasets: Advancing Comparative Research in Party Behavior and Legislative Organization Across Electoral Systems
- Author(s)
- Matthew Bergman, Cory Struthers, Matthew Shugart, Robert Pekkanan, Ellis Krauss
- Abstract
This paper introduces eight country-level datasets with >50,000 observations that can be used to analyze novel comparative questions concerning party personnel strategies-how parties recruit candidates and allocate members across party, legislative, and cabinet positions. We make these datasets public to inspire comparative research, especially from an electoral systems perspective; electoral systems shape constituency representation and influence how parties recruit candidates and organize members in legislative and government bodies. In this paper, we first briefly review the relevant literature on electoral nomination and post-election appointment and then describe our motivations for constructing multi-country datasets that can be used to further comparative research. To illustrate the possibilities in these new datasets, we show how recruitment and placement of parliamentarians with particular personal characteristics correlates with their placement onto specific committees and cabinet posts. A conclusion identifies other areas of research that might benefit from using the party personnel datasets.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- External organisation(s)
- University of California, Davis, University of Georgia, University of Washington, University of California, San Diego
- Journal
- Legislative Studies Quarterly
- Volume
- 47
- Pages
- 741-759
- No. of pages
- 19
- ISSN
- 0362-9805
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12365
- Publication date
- 12-2021
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506014 Comparative politics
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Sociology and Political Science
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/bffb61c4-125a-46ff-9984-ed754ccceec3