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 impact of party cues on manual coding of political texts
- Author(s)
- Laurenz Ennser-Jedenastik, Thomas Meyer
- Abstract
Do coders of political texts incorporate prior beliefs about parties' issue stances into their coding decisions? We report results from a coding experiment in which ten coders were each given 200 statements on immigration that were extracted from election manifestos. Party labels in these statements were randomly assigned (including a control without party cues). Coders were more likely to code a statement as pro-immigration if it was attributed to the Greens and less likely choose the anti-immigration category if it was to the populist radical right. No effect was found for mainstream parties of the center-left and center-right. The results also suggest that coders resort to party cues as heuristics when faced with ambiguous policy statements.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- Journal
- Political Science Research and Methods
- Volume
- 6
- Pages
- 625-633
- No. of pages
- 9
- ISSN
- 2049-8470
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2017.29
- Publication date
- 09-2017
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506014 Comparative politics
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/d78651fc-3e64-4ff6-a66e-240fd85b1adf