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
Government Conflict as a Heuristic for Governmental Responsibility The Example of Germany
- Author(s)
- Mariyana Angelova
- Abstract
Electoral accountability has been shown to be jeopardized in complex political systems with blurred lines of responsibility. In political systems, where many actors besides the government are involved in the decision-making process, voters have difficulties to indicate the government as responsible and hold it accountable at elections. However, even in complex political systems some individuals do hold the government responsible and accountable. This paper argues that voters deal with complex political settings by using heuristics which help them figure out whether and when the government is responsible. One such heuristic is governmental conflict. Government conflict is easy to observe, draws the attention of the voters towards the government and sends a clear signal that the government has difficulties to find a way to deal with current challenges. To show that government conflict is used as a heuristic for government responsibility this paper chooses Germany as a testing scenario and relies on survey data launched within the German Internet Panel (GIP) in 2012. The analysis reveals that perceptions of government conflict have a strong effect on participants’ beliefs whether the government is predominantly responsible for policy gridlock. Additionally, if government conflict is used as ”rule of thumb” for governmental responsibility, then governmental accountability should be conditioned upon government conflict. Further analysis on governmental and partisan ratings as well as voting intention show that survey participants sanction the government as a whole and the leading coalition partner CDU/CSU for dissatisfactory policy performance (economy and across 20 policy areas) only when they perceive high government conflict. This finding holds only for government and CDU/CSU supporters, who have in the first place the incentive to shift policy responsibility from the government to other actors.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- Pages
- 1
- No. of pages
- 34
- Publication date
- 2015
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506014 Comparative politics
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/cd515a73-db34-43b9-890b-6ba0204b7422