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
Arguments that can sway EU attitudes: Evidence from a survey experiment of German Voters
- Author(s)
- Nikoleta Yordanova, Roni Lehrer, Moritz Osnabrügge, Mariyana Angelova, Sander Renes
- Abstract
The recent Brexit referendum and the rise of Eurosceptic parties across European states have brought up questions on what causes increasing public Euroscepticism. We study how framing citizens with positive or negative arguments about the EU in political campaigns can affect their intention to support leaving the EU in a hypothetical EU-exit referendum in Germany. Given the asymmetric information about the EU in this founding member state, where citizens have been exposed to positive coverage of European integration for decades, we expect negative ar- guments that have not yet been priced in to have a stronger potential to affect German citizens’ EU attitudes than positive arguments about the EU. Using a 2- wave survey experiment conducted within the German Internet Panel study (fielded in July 2016 and March 2017) and a difference-in-difference analysis, we examine how framing respondents with positive or negative political, cultural, economic and security-related arguments about the EU affects their propensity to support Ger- many leaving the EU. In line with our expectations, we find significant framing and persuasion effects of negative frames only, albeit limited to the political frame. Moreover, we show that undecided and less sophisticated respondents are more receptive to such framing and persuasion. The study adds to the literature on cam- paign effects in high salience environments as well as to our understanding of what type of campaign messages can play a role in potential future EU-exit referendums. We further point to what specific messages can breed Euroscepticism in Germany, which policy-makers could preemptively address.- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- External organisation(s)
- Universität Mannheim, Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi, Erasmus University Rotterdam
- Publication date
- 12-2019
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506014 Comparative politics
- Keywords
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/df094908-4824-4fa8-bdca-41d81a426e8e