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
An Emotional Rally
- Author(s)
- Olga Eisele, Olga Litvyak, Verena K. Brändle, Paul Balluff, Andreas Fischeneder, Catherine Sotirakou, Kim Pamina Syed Ali, Hajo Boomgaarden
- Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic presents an unparalleled global crisis impacting both public and private life. In the situation of uncertainty, emotions run high and might compromise the public acceptance of and compliance with countermeasures tackling the crisis. Mass media play an integral part in communicating crisis measures and provide an institutionalised channel to diffuse relevant information to a broad audience. This is especially true for digital outlets of legacy media given the greater immediacy of coverage. In addition, digital news offers the unique opportunity for readers to engage with the news contents, allowing an analysis of the dynamics of emotional reactions to crisis news coverage. We explore the case of Austria as an early COVID-19 hotspot. We analyse digital news coverage of two high-circulation newspapers and the emotionality it prompted in user comments, based on a unique dataset comprising 38,253 articles and around 1.6 Million comments from 1 January 2020 to 30 June 2020. Results show increased emotionality during lockdown and towards the government. With reference to the rally around-the-flag literature, we interpret this as emotional rallying behind the responsible political crisis managers.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Communication, Department of Government
- External organisation(s)
- National & Kapodistrian University of Athens
- Journal
- Digital Journalism
- Volume
- 10
- Pages
- 952-975
- No. of pages
- 24
- ISSN
- 2167-0811
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2021.2004552
- Publication date
- 12-2021
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 508020 Political communication
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Communication
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/d3192bff-d289-443b-b41c-a3ac57da4f7b