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
Europe's migration crisis: Local contact and out‐group hostility
- Author(s)
- Lukas Rudolph, Markus Wagner
- Abstract
Does a large influx of asylum seekers in the local community lead to a backlash in public opinion towards foreign populations? We assess the effects of asylum seeker presence using original survey and macro-level municipality data from Austria, exploiting exogenous elements of the placement of asylum seekers on the municipality level. Methodologically, we draw on entropy balancing for causal identification. Our findings are threefold. First, respondents in municipalities receiving asylum seekers report substantially higher exposure on average, but largely without the stronger contact that would allow for meaningful interaction. Second, hostility towards asylum seekers on average increased in areas that housed them. Third, this backlash spilt over: general attitudes towards Muslims and immigrants are less favourable in contexts with local asylum seeker presence, while vote intention for the main anti-immigration party is higher. Our findings go beyond existing work by examining contact directly as a mechanism, by showing a backlash effect in the medium term, and by focusing on a broad set of attitudinal and behavioural measures. Our results point to a need to design policy interventions that minimise citizen backlash against rapid migration inflows.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- External organisation(s)
- Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
- Journal
- European Journal of Political Research
- Volume
- 61
- Pages
- 268-280
- No. of pages
- 13
- ISSN
- 0304-4130
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6765.12455
- Publication date
- 2021
- 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/f5bc4709-4fb8-4bd7-b79d-bd67cd30a7a6