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 friends and neighbors? Explaining the electoral appeal of local roots
- Author(s)
- Rosie Campbell, Phil Cowley, Nick Vivyan, Markus Wagner
- Abstract
Why do politicians with strong local roots receive more electoral support? The mechanisms underlying this well-documented “friends and neighbors” effect remain largely untested. Drawing on two population-based survey experiments fielded in Britain, we provide the first experimental test of a commonly posited cue-based explanation, which argues that voters use politicians’ local roots (descriptive localism) to make inferences about politicians’ likely actions in office (behavioral localism). Consistent with the cue-based account, we find that a politician’s local roots are less predictive of voter evaluations when voters have access to explicit information about aspects of the politician’s actual behavioral localism. However, we also find that voters’ positive reaction to local roots is only partially explained by a cue-based account in which voters care about the aspects of behavioral localism tested in this article. Our findings inform a normative debate concerning the implications of friends-and-neighbors voting for democratic representation and accountability.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- External organisation(s)
- Durham University, King's College London, Queen Mary University of London
- Journal
- Journal of Politics
- Volume
- 81
- Pages
- 937-951
- No. of pages
- 15
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1086/703131
- Publication date
- 07-2019
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506014 Comparative politics
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Sociology and Political Science
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/eec94e82-d15e-4835-88df-10ae219df86d