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
Explaining Reforms of Minority Rights in Parliaments: A Theoretical Framework with Case Study Application
- Author(s)
- Ulrich Sieberer, Wolfgang Claudius Müller
- Abstract
How can we explain the institutional reforms that redistribute institutional power between the parliamentary majority and minority? This paper proposes an informal theoretical model to explain such reforms in European parliaments based on Congressional literature and inductive explanations from case studies. We argue that political parties as the relevant actors pursue institutional reforms based on their substantive goals, their current and expected future government status, transaction and audience costs of reforms, second-order institutions that regulate the relative influence of actors in changing parliamentary rules, and the institutional status quo. Hypotheses derived from this model are tested with a qualitative case study of all standing order reforms in the Austrian parliament from 1945 to 2014. The empirical analysis finds support for various hypotheses and their underlying causal mechanisms. As Austria constitutes a least-likely case, the evidence provides strong support for our theoretical model.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- External organisation(s)
- Universität Konstanz
- Journal
- West European Politics
- Volume
- 38
- Pages
- 997–1019
- ISSN
- 0140-2382
- Publication date
- 2015
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506014 Comparative politics, 506012 Political systems
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Social Sciences
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/fd156f19-d1b1-4e41-bcc5-1341fa829e3c