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
Can specific personality traits better explain EU attitudes?
- Author(s)
- Julian Aichholzer, Beatrice Rammstedt
- Abstract
Scholars trying to understand attitudes toward the European Union (EU) are increasingly interested in citizens’ basic predispositions, such as the “Big Five” personality traits. However, previous research on this particular relationship has failed to provide sound hypotheses and lacks consistent evidence. We propose that looking at specific facets of the Big Five offers a deeper understanding of the associations between personality predispositions, their measures, and EU attitudes. For this purpose, the 60-item Big Five Inventory-2, which explicitly measures Big Five domains and facets, was administered in a German population sample. We applied a variant of structural equation modeling and found that personality predispositions promoting communal and solidary behavior, cognitive elaboration, and a lower tendency to experience negative emotions predicted support for further European integration. Greater support of European integration might thus reflect, in part, basic psychological predispositions that facilitate adapting to the political, social, and cultural complexity posed by Europeanization. The study thus contributes to our understanding of deep-rooted patterns in thoughts and feelings that can shape citizens’ EU attitudes.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- External organisation(s)
- GESIS – Leibniz-Institut für Sozialwissenschaften
- Journal
- Acta Politica: international journal of political science
- Volume
- 56
- Pages
- 530–547
- No. of pages
- 18
- ISSN
- 0001-6810
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1057/s41269-020-00164-6
- Publication date
- 05-2020
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506012 Political systems, 506004 European integration, 501004 Differential psychology
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Political Science and International Relations
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/f45432de-c8e5-482d-86a6-29830271c310