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
Understanding Policy Reversals and Policy Stability
- Author(s)
- Wolfgang Claudius Müller, Paul W. Thurner
- Abstract
This chapter discusses structural, institutional, and situational factors that exercise influence on nuclear energy policy decisions. It reviews the respective literatures and introduces the dependent variable, i.e. nuclear energy policy reversals. Building in particular on the work of Kitschelt (1986) and Midttun and Rucht (1994), the chapter then discusses the explanatory variables that potentially drive such changes: anti-nuclear movements, public opinion, the systems’ electoral and federal openness, political parties’ vote-seeking, principled ideological goals, or office-seeking, new policy challenges in terms of energy policy and climate change concerns, nuclear accidents, and path dependence due to the countries investment in nuclear energy. Hypotheses are formulated for how these factors impact nuclear energy policy-making.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- External organisation(s)
- Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
- Pages
- 21-46
- No. of pages
- 26
- Publication date
- 2017
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506014 Comparative politics, 506010 Policy analysis, 506012 Political systems
- Sustainable Development Goals
- SDG 7 - Affordable and Clean Energy, SDG 13 - Climate Action
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/f202b81c-227a-4bed-b35a-dd2c84c1e300