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
Why Monarchy?
- Author(s)
- Daniel Weitzel, John Gerring, Tore Wig, Wouter Veenendaal, Jan Teorell, Kyosuke Kikuta
- Abstract
Monarchy was the dominant form of rule in the pre-modern era and it persists in a handful of countries. We propose a unified theoretical explanation for its rise and decline. Specifically, we argue that monarchy offers an efficient solution to the primordial problem of order where societies are large and citizens isolated from each other and hence have difficulty coordinating. Its efficiency is challenged by other methods of leadership selection when communication costs decline, lowering barriers to citizen coordination. This explains its dominance in the pre-modern world and its subsequent demise. To test this theory, we produce an original dataset that codes monarchies and republics in Europe (back to 1100) and the world (back to 1700). With this dataset, we test a number of observable implications of the theory—centering on territory size, political stability, tenure in office, conflict, and the role of mass communications in the modern era.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- External organisation(s)
- University of Texas, Austin, University of Oslo, Leiden University, Lund University, Osaka University
- Journal
- Comparative Political Studies
- Volume
- 54
- Pages
- 585
- No. of pages
- 622
- ISSN
- 0010-4140
- Publication date
- 07-2020
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506014 Comparative politics
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/d8663c0d-93c7-4cbf-be65-bdc9048026e9