Marcelo Jenny

University of Innsbruck | UIBK · Department of Political Sciences

Die Formulierung „Entscheidungen in eigener Sache“ ist in Österreich weder in der Rechts- noch in der Politikwissenschaft gebräuchlich. Die damit umschriebenen Elemente der Rechtsordnung und des politischen Systems werden jedoch seit langem diskutiert , besonders im Kontext der Kombination von Konkordanzdemokratie und der dominanten Rolle der polit...

You can find the chapter figures here: https://www.politisches-system.at/parteien/

This entry includes data on changes in national government composition, party leadership changes and parliamentary composition in Austria in 2021, as well as election results from a subnational election. It covers the Austrian coalition government between the Austrian People's Party (ÖVP) and the Greens, led by Sebastian Kurz, in the second year of...

This chapter focuses on parties belonging to the populist right-wing I&D family, and specifically those who were in national government at the time of the campaign. While these parties did express Eurosceptic sympathies, they did not focus their campaign messaging on the EU having now taken office; in fact, these politicians appeared more preoccupi...

In the Austrian parliament a strict time regime keeps the length of debates at bay. While the government sets most of the agenda, opposition parties can get some proposals debated, and new instruments provide room for debate of topics independent of government legislation and reports. Debates are under tight party control with regard to the speaker...

Though negativity in political debates influences citizens’ attitudes towards legislative institutions, research on how Members of Parliaments (MPs) use negative language remains scant. This study shows how the gender of speakers and the context of debates influence the level of negativity in parliamentary speeches. We argue that female MPs use les...

This paper examines the validity of three approaches to estimate party positions on the general left–right and EU dimensions. We newly introduce party elite data from the comprehensive IntUne survey and cross-validate it with existing expert survey and manifesto data. The general left–right estimates generated by elites and experts show a higher co...

This dataset contains a German-language sentiment dictionary of 5,001 negative words and their associated sentiment strength on a five-point-scale from 0 (not negative) to 4 (very strongly negative). The procedure for building the dictionary contains the following steps: (1) Sampling 12,713 sentences from Austrian parliamentary debates (1995-2013),...

The dataset contains 125,871 sentences extracted from Austrian parliamentary debates and party press releases (1995-2013). The sentiment of the sentences was crowdcoded on a five-point-scale ranging from 0 "Not negative" to 5 "Very strongly negative". Data are available for download at the Austrian Social Science Data Archive (AUSSDA): https://dat...

We study how partisanship influences the perception of directed campaign statements of varying polarity and sentiment strength. Using a crowdsourced survey experiment with German participants, we find asymmetrical perceptual biases. Partisan respondents perceive negative campaigning from or about a party they favour, as less negative than non-parti...

For all their differences, both Austria and Switzerland have long been considered to represent key examples of consociational democracy. Since the 1990s, both countries have however faced major challenges to their respective consociationalist regimes. One of the shared features of regime evolution and change in Austria and Switzerland, which can be...

In democracies with multi-party competition, government parties face a dual challenge in election campaigns: on the one hand, they have to compete against and criticize their coalition partners. On the other hand, they should avoid virulent attacks on their partners to preserve their chances of future collaboration in government. Going beyond a dic...

Moving beyond the dominant bag-of-words approach to sentiment analysis we introduce an alternative procedure based on distributed word embeddings. The strength of word embeddings is the ability to capture similarities in word meaning. We use word embeddings as part of a supervised machine learning procedure which estimates levels of negativity in p...

Unconstrained by organizational tradition new parties can devise highly innovative procedures. NEOS, a new liberal party that entered the national parliament in 2013, is proud of currently having the most inclusive and transparent candidate selection procedure of Austrian parties. Three selectorates, formed of citizens, the party executive and part...

The chapter describes candidate selection procedures of old and new parties competing in recent Austrian legislative elections, based on party statutes, media reports and interviews with party functionaries and Members of Parliament. Current legislative candidate selection procedures vary strongly in terms of centralization, inclusiveness and compl...

Sentiment is important in studies of news values, public opinion, negative campaigning or political polarization and an explosive expansion of digital textual data and fast progress in automated text analysis provide vast opportunities for innovative social science research. Unfortunately, tools currently available for automated sentiment analysis...

In this paper, we use several supervised machine learning approaches and compare their success in predicting the sentiment of Austrian parliamentary speeches and news reports (German language). Prediction results in learning-based sentiment analysis vary strongly. They depend on the choice of algorithm and its parameterization, the quality and quan...

Electoral manifestos play a crucial role in visions of party democracy and political science analyses of party competition. While research has focused on the contents of manifestos, we know much less about how parties produce manifestos and the roles they take in campaigns. This paper identifies three campaign-related functions of manifestos: they...

This article analyses constituency campaigning and personalization when electoral system and party organizational incentives conflict . Providing the first study of candidate campaign behaviour in Austria we show that a sizeable number of candidates in national elections engage in personalized rather than party-centred campaigns. Focusing on behavi...

Careful users of CMP party position data should take the uncertainty of position estimates into account. We compare and evaluate two current approaches that provide error estimates for party positions. Researchers of the CMP group identify measurement error in quantitative content analysis as the cause of uncertainty about position estimates, where...

Austria is one of the older federal states in Europe. The study of Austrian federalism was initially a domain of constitutional scholars until political science began to enhance federalism research from the late 1960s onward. Political scientists have studied the characteristics of regional political systems, its institutions and party systems, and...

The chapter makes one conceptual and one empirical contribution to the study of the elite-masses gap in European integration. While most research focuses on substantive representation of voter opinions by MPs, under the 'issue congruence paradigm' we consider the entire chain of delegation from voters, to MPs, to governments. Representation gaps ar...

In this chapter we subject Austrian legislation to two different approaches of measuring the extent of Europeanization. We begin by outlining the political and legal framework of legal Europeanization in Austria. Next, we address the Europeanization of lawmaking, that is, the impact of EU membership on the national laws passed immediately before an...

This paper examines the reciprocal nature of dynamic representation in 14 European democracies. It takes up the stylized fact that the strength of mass-elite linkage varies over the electoral cycle. Based on the IntUne mass and elite surveys our empirical analyses suggest that European integration is characterized by elites exerting considerable in...

The paper contributes to the emerging literature on why and when RCVs are used by political parties competing in a party democracy. It builds on an analysis of all roll-call votes held in the first chamber of the Austrian parliament over the entire post-war period (1945-2010). The paper identifies position-taking and obstruction as two plausible pu...

Drawing on a candidate survey we investigate three hierarchically ordered dimensions of individualized campaigns: candidate goals, candidate behavior, and election outcome. We show that a sizeable number of candidates engage in individualized (rather than party-centered) campaigns. These candidates do use individualized means of communication, both...

This article addresses the scope of legal Europeanization with regard to Austria, a 1995 accession country. Depending on the choice among several plausible indicators of legal Europeanization, the relative impact of the EU varies greatly. The share of EU-related legislation peaked in the pre-accession period when most of the acquis communautaire ne...

By mid-2003, the legal orders (the entire bodies of legislation in force) of three EU member states – Austria , Denmark, and The Netherlands – contained between 10.5 and 14.2 per cent of rules devoted to the transposition of EU directives. Only a few ministerial jurisdictions contain more than 20 per cent of Europeanized rules. The member states sh...

Institutional questions range high on the European agenda since the beginning of the 1990s at the latest. A rapid series of intergovernmental conferences — Maastricht, Amsterdam, and Nice — kept the reform debate alive in the public. Inocously called “left-overs”, the key questions touched on nothing less than a reorganisation of political power in...

Cohesive parliamentary party behaviour can be caused either by the representatives' preference identity or by the influence the parties exercise on them. Parties can be considered strong only if their respective MPs follow the party line when it: conflicts with their individual preferences. Based on a survey among MPs in the 1995-1999 parliament we...