Laurenz Ennser-Jedenastik

University of Vienna | UniWien · Institut für Staatswissenschaft

A central theme emerging from recent research on party competition is that political actors sometimes remain deliberately opaque in their communication. This phenomenon has been investigated under labels such as position-blurring, ambiguity, issue clarity or ideological clarity. In this paper we propose a distinction between two concepts that are s...

Zusammenfassung In der Außenpolitik gilt oft die Norm der Überparteilichkeit: Parteipolitik habe an der Staatsgrenze zu enden. Demgegenüber steht die Erwartung, dass Parteien im Wettbewerb ihre programmatischen Unterschiede betonen. In diesem Spannungsfeld untersucht dieser Beitrag die österreichische Außenpolitik seit 1945. Zwar herrscht tatsächli...

Why do parties appoint outsiders and experts to ministerial positions? Extant research offers explanations based on institutional arrangements and external shocks (e.g. political or economic crises). We go beyond such system-level variables to argue that the characteristics of ministerial appointees are a function of the portfolio they are being ap...

How do political actors respond when an issue suddenly jumps to the top of the public agenda? While conventional theories of party behaviour predict that parties increase their attention to that issue, they tell us little about how they will do so. One approach is to increase attention to the focal issue while maintaining the messaging level on oth...

We combine the recent literature on issue competition with work on intra‐party heterogeneity to advance a novel theoretical argument. Starting from the premise that party leaders and non‐leaders have different motivations and incentives, we conjecture that issue strategies should vary across the party hierarchy. We, therefore, expect systematic int...

Radical right parties have gained access to government across Europe, yet scholarly work on how they shape welfare states remains scarce. Therefore, this article examines how radical right parties affect family benefits. Combining pro-natalist views with a commitment to traditional gender roles, these parties seek to support family incomes without...

Angekündigte Impfbereitschaft wirkt sich stark auf die tatsächliche Inanspruchnahme der Coronavirus-Schutzimpfung aus. Selbst objektive Risikofaktoren wie Alter und Vorerkrankungen führen bei Personen mit niedriger Impfbereitschaft nicht zu höheren Impfquoten. Die derzeitige Impfkampagne, die auf die Angebotsseite fokussiert, erreicht daher Persone...

Representative democracy presents politicians with an information problem: How to find out what voters want? While party elites used to rely on their membership or mass surveys, social media enables them to learn about voters’ issue priorities in real time and adapt their campaign messages accordingly. Yet, we know next to nothing about how campaig...

Left-right partisan conflict has been a key driver of welfare state expansion and retrenchment over time and across countries. Yet, we know very little about how left-right differences in party appeals vary across social policy domains. Why are some issues contentious while there is broad consensus on others? This paper starts from the simple premi...

This paper applies recent theoretical arguments about the relationship between redistributive justice principles and welfare chauvinism to the case of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ). These arguments hold that parties vary welfare chauvinist appeals according to the redistributive principles underlying social programs. Means-tested and universal b...

Rational choice theories of political behavior start from the premise that parties seek policy, office, and votes. In accordance with this premise, previous research has shown that electoral performance and office achievement independently affect party leader survival. However, we know little about how goal attainment interacts across these two dom...

Gender is one of the most frequently studied variables in the literature on judicial decision-making. We add to this literature by hypothesizing that the impact of applicant gender is conditional on the gender balance in a judge’s caseload. We expect that female applicants receive more favorable decisions from judges whose caseload skews strongly m...

Representative democracy presents politicians with an information problem: How to find out what voters want? While party elites used to rely on their membership or mass surveys, social media enables them to learn about voters' issue priorities in real time and adapt their campaign messages accordingly. Yet, we know next to nothing about how campaig...

In recent years, political science in Austria has become more open, more internationally oriented, and more visible internationally. While all these developments must clearly be welcomed, they do not automatically translate into greater relevance of the discipline. In this contribution we outline four criteria that need to be fulfilled for empirica...

Why are some parties more likely than others to keep the promises they made during previous election campaigns? This study provides the first comparative analysis that addresses this question with common definitions of pledges and fulfillment. We study the fulfillment of 18,743 pledges made in 54 election campaigns in 12 countries. We find high lev...

Do coders of political texts incorporate prior beliefs about parties’ issue stances into their coding decisions? We report results from a coding experiment in which ten coders were each given 200 statements on immigration that were extracted from election manifestos. Party labels in these statements were randomly assigned (including a control categ...

Scholars of political elite behavior have documented a strong link between gender and social policy focus among politicians. In the electoral, legislative, and governmental arena, female politicians give higher priority to social policy matters. While this gender gap is well-documented, it is less well understood. Using measures of campaign issue e...

Welfare chauvinism has become an important element in the agenda of the populist radical right. This article proposes a novel argument to explain variation in the strength of welfare chauvinist appeals across social policy programmes. It theorizes that the redistributive justice principles (equity, equality, and need) that underpin a social program...

Die personelle Verflechtung zwischen Parteien und sozialpartnerschaftlichen Organisationen ist einer der zentralen Gründe für die Stabilität des korporatistischen Institutionengefüges der Zweiten Republik. Dieser Beitrag liefert die bis dato umfangreichste und systematischste Analyse der personellen Verflechtungen zwischen der Bundesregierung und s...

Social policy matters have long been considered women’s issues. Extant research has documented a strong link between gender and the policies of the welfare state in the legislative, executive and electoral arenas. Yet what determines the strength of this association has largely been left unexplored. Drawing on tokenism theory, this article proposes...

Recent research finds that women's political representation correlates with higher social expenditures. This paper makes two more specific predictions regarding family benefits. First, women voters and politicians are likely to prefer in-kind benefits to cash transfers. This is because the provision of childcare does more than money can do to ameli...

This article examines aspects of election manifestos that are largely ignored by extant manifesto-based studies focusing on issue saliencies and policy positions. Drawing on the literatures on negative campaigning, retrospective voting, party mandates and personalization, we develop a scheme of categories that allows for the analysis of attacks on...

How does gender affect the attack strategies of political actors? Do men and women diverge in their propensity to go negative and in their choice of targets? Extant research has long sought to shed light on these questions (e.g., Brooks 2010; Kahn 1993; Krupnikov and Bauer 2014; Proctor, Schenck-Hamlin, and Haase 1994; Walter 2013). Among all the p...

This paper explores four potential motivations for the party politicization of the senior civil service: ideological agreement, coalition governance, party family issue priorities, and consociational representation. Using data on the party affiliation of 134 secretaries-general (SGs) serving in the Dutch ministerial bureaucracy between 1945 and 201...

What explains the social policy profile of populist radical right parties (PRRPs)? Building on the argument made by Mudde (2007) that socio-economic policies are secondary elements within the populist radical right ideology, this paper conjectures that the primary elements of that ideology (nativism, authoritarianism, and populism) structure the PR...

Negative campaigning presents parties with a collective action problem. While parties would prefer to have their competitors attacked, potential backlash effects from negative messages mean that individual politicians typically lack the incentives to carry out such attacks. We theorize that parties solve this problem by implementing a division of l...

We present a new method to analyze party manifestos to benefit the placement of political parties per se and to advance the study of elections. Our method improves on existing manual coding approaches by (1) generating semantically complete units based on syntax, (2) standardizing units into a subject–predicate–object structure, and (3) employing a...

The past decades have seen a dramatic increase in the number of regulatory agencies (RAs) across countries and policy domains. To establish credible regulatory regimes, many RAs are formally shielded from direct political influence and thus enjoy high levels of legal autonomy. While granting formal independence to an agency may erect some instituti...

The extant literature has demonstrated that the logic of retaliation is a core feature of negative campaigning. Attacks by one side induce counterattacks by the other. Yet most research on the interactive nature of negative campaigning is limited to two-party competition and provides little theoretical justification for why political actors should...

There is a natural tension between theories of party government and theories of regulatory politics. Whereas effective party government requires that politicians have firm control over public policy, the need for credible commitment in regulation stipulate s that policy-making capacities are delegated to independent agencies. While the theoretical...

The ideological orientation of parties in government has not been prominently featured in explaining the rise of regulatory agencies. This paper argues that theories based on political uncertainty and credible commitment can yield meaningful predictions regarding the relationship between government preferences and the establishment of regulatory ag...

Legally independent central banks leave elected politicians with little direct control over monetary policy. The most important indirect channel of influence for governments thus consists in appointing ‘responsive’ central bank officials and removing ‘hostile’ ones. This premise is tested by examining the effect of partisan ties between central ban...

While much has been said about the formation and termination of coalitions, comparatively little attention has been paid to the policy output of multiparty governments. The present study attempts to narrow this research gap by analyzing policy making in three Austrian coalition governments between 1999 and 2008. Drawing on the party mandate literat...

Saliency theory is among the most influential accounts of party competition, not least in providing the theoretical framework for the Comparative Manifesto Project – one of the most widely used data collections in comparative politics. Despite its prominence, not all empirical implications of the saliency theory of party competition have yet been s...

Previous studies have found that Austria has one of the most nationalized party systems in Western Europe. Using local election data from over 2300 municipalities between 1985 and 2009, we show that nationalisation of the party system varies considerably across regions. We demonstrate that variation in the organisational strength of regional party...

Political parties are central to modern democracy and the selection of its leader is one of the most crucial decisions for any political party to make. Yet, the analysis of party leadership survival is still in its infancy. The pioneering research has been confined to few countries and decades and has focused exclusively on performance-related expl...

One of the most persistent findings in coalition research is the proportionality rule (‘Gamson's Law’) that guides the allocation of portfolios between parties. This article tests the assumption that a similar rule is at work within parties. More specifically, it examines the allocation of ministerial posts to regional party branches in 25 post-war...

While commonly regarded as a democratic pathology, party patronage can also be understood as an inherent feature of party government and thus as a linkage mechanism between political parties and the government executive. Therefore, theories of government formation, portfolio allocation and coalition governance can potentially add analytical leverag...

This article explores the impact of political determinants on the survival of managers in state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Drawing on theories of bureaucratic delegation, it is argued that preference divergence between principals and agents as well as among principals is a major driver of managerial turnover. More specifically, the partisan affiliat...

Most analyses of policy outcomes from coalition-bargaining have hitherto been conducted within a spatial framework that requires the aggregation of coalition policy into a small number of point estimates. Such an approach, however, is limited in terms of the level of specificity at which it can operate. This article therefore draws on the methodolo...

Die vorliegende Arbeit präsentiert die erste umfassende quantitative Analyse von parteipolitischen Postenbesetzungen in österreichischen Staatsunternehmen. Die Datengrundlage bildet eine Erhebung der Parteibindungen von sämtlichen 1242 Personen, die zwischen 1995 und 2010 in die Vorstände, Geschäfts-führungen und Aufsichtsräte von mehrheitlich bund...

This paper presents the first comprehensive quantitative analysis of patronage appointments in Austrian state-owned enterprises. It is based on data on the nominations of 1242 individuals to managerial boards in corporations that were majority-owned by the Austrian federal government between 1995 and 2010. The multivariate models show that the comp...

Election manifestos are one of the most prominent sources of data for the study of party politics and government. Yet the processes of manifesto production, enactment, and public reception are not very well understood. This article attempts to narrow this knowledge gap by conducting a first investigation into the ‘life cycle’ of election manifestos...

Common concepts for the classification of parties into families (origins, transnational links, ideology, name) suggest that the radical right should be less homogeneous than most other party families in Western Europe: their comparatively diverse origins, disputed ideological core features, as well as the lack of stable transnational cooperation an...

One of the most profound transformations in the organization of the public sector in Europe during the past decades has been the ‘rise of the regulatory state’ (Majone 1994). The institutional manifestation of this transformation is the increased delegation of authority to independent regulatory agencies. Extant explanations stress the need for cre...