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.
Political Institutions
Institutions play a key role in political systems, as they define the framework conditions for political decisions...
Political Representation
Political representation describes the institutional and social processes and practices that connect citizens and voters to...
Party Competition
Party competition is an essential component of democratic systems and describes the competition between political parties for votes...
Infrastructural Projects
Infrastructural projects are an essential component of scientific research, as they create the basis for long-term data collection...
Political Behaviour
Political behaviour deals with the individual and collective attitudes and actions of citizens in a political context...
Cooperations
Cooperations are a central component of scientific research, as they promote the exchange of knowledge, resources and...
Publications
Party Rules, Party Resources, and the Politics of Parliamentary Democracies
- Author(s)
- Thomas Poguntke, Susan E. Scarrow, Paul D. Webb, Ellin H. Allein, Nicholas Aylott, Ingrid van Biezen, Enrico Calossi, Marina Costa Lobo, William P. Cross, Kris Deschouwer, Zsolt Enyedi, Elodie Fabre, David M. Farrell, Anika Gauja, Eugenio Pizzimenti, Petr Kopecký, Ruud Koole, Wolfgang Claudius Müller, Karina Kosiara-Pedersen, Gideon Rahat, Aleks Szczerbiak, Emilie van Haute, Tània Verge
- Abstract
This article introduces the first findings of the Political Party Database Project, a major survey of party organizations in parliamentary and semi-presidential democracies. The project’s first round of data covers 122 parties in 19 countries. In this article, we describe the scope of the database, then investigate what it tells us about contemporary party organization in these countries, focusing on parties’ resources, structures and internal decision-making. We examine organizational patterns by country and party family, and where possible we make temporal comparisons with older data sets. Our analyses suggest a remarkable coexistence of uniformity and diversity. In terms of the major organizational resources on which parties can draw, such as members, staff and finance, the new evidence largely confirms the continuation of trends identified in previous research: that is, declining membership, but enhanced financial resources and more paid staff. We also find remarkable uniformity regarding the core architecture of party organizations. At the same time, however, we find
substantial variation between countries and party families in terms of their internal processes, with particular regard to how internally democratic they are, and the forms that this democratization takes.- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- External organisation(s)
- Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, University of Sussex, University of Houston, Unknown External Organisation Unbekannt/undefiniert
- Journal
- Party Politics
- Volume
- 22
- Pages
- 661-678
- No. of pages
- 18
- ISSN
- 1354-0688
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1177/1354068816662493
- Publication date
- 11-2016
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506014 Comparative politics
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Sociology and Political Science
- Sustainable Development Goals
- SDG 16 - Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/dbf506b5-8982-4b1f-af9b-2cc25e026569