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
Austria: Rejecting Nuclear Energy – From Party Competition Accident to State Doctrine
- Author(s)
- Wolfgang Claudius Müller
- Abstract
This chapter discusses nuclear energy policy in Austria since the 1950s. It stresses, that political parties were the main actors and decision-making on energy policy was strongly influenced by them. Building on the work of Strøm (1990) and Müller and Strøm (1999) it is argued that several position changes regarding nuclear energy were made by Austrian parties in response to public opinion, trading-off policy against votes or office. The Austrian case resembled other Western European countries until the 1970s, when a nuclear power plant was built but never made operational because of a negative referendum. After a decade of struggling with attempts at policy reversal, an anti-nuclear consensus was reached after Chernobyl. Soon parties did engage in a new form of competition on the nuclear issue – over their competence in fighting nuclear energy in other countries, in particular plants close to the Austrian border.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- Pages
- 98-124
- No. of pages
- 27
- Publication date
- 2017
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506010 Policy analysis, 506011 Political history, 506012 Political systems
- Sustainable Development Goals
- SDG 7 - Affordable and Clean Energy
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/c86af369-7d62-4f22-aa4c-1a38866845cd