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
Intra-party determinants of the allocation of legislative speeches
- Author(s)
- Michael Imre, Alejandro Ecker
- Abstract
Parliamentary speech is an important and highly visible feature of legislatures in democracies. Time in parliament is scarce and the allocation of floor time is characterised by largely incompatible preferences between party leaders, aiming to preserve a unified party label, and individual members of parliament (MPs), facing incentives to differentiate themselves and take alternative stances to maximise their personal reelection prospects. This paper investigates the role of MP policy positions in the allocation of parliamentary speeches in different institutional settings. Measuring positions using a novel dataset containing tweets by MPs in three European countries, we find that MPs with positions diverging from the party line get allocated less time on the parliamentary floor when floor time is exclusively controlled by parties, but not when parliamentary rules allow individual access to the floor.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- External organisation(s)
- Scientific Software Center
- Journal
- The Journal of Legislative Studies
- ISSN
- 1357-2334
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1080/13572334.2023.2287347
- Publication date
- 01-2024
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506014 Comparative politics
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Law, Political Science and International Relations
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/fd881df6-a842-403a-973d-ee63efda0eb3