Martin Dolezal

• Dr.
• Senior Researcher at University of Salzburg

Why do citizens support holding a referendum? In this article, we argue that citizens are instrumental by using heuristics and cues from parties, independent experts, and the population to decide whether to hold a referendum. We further expect that populist and non-populist citizens differ in how they respond to these cues. Using pre-registered sur...

In this paper we report on the development of an agent-based model (ABM) simulating the behaviour of voters and the positioning of political parties in Austria. The aim is to create what-if scenarios taking into account contextual changes, such as political crises as well as changes in parties’ policy positions and voters’ attitudes. Drawing on dat...

Populism represents the greatest political challenge to Western democracies since World War II. The electoral successes of populist parties and actors, Brexit, the presidency of Donald Trump or campaigns against containing the coronavirus pandemic are expressions of this phenomenon, in which the electorate is mobilised against supposed elites. The...

This report presents the first results of the work on causes of populism, within WP4 (Causal, Policy and Futures Analysis) of PaCE project, H2020. It focuses specifically on identifying and analyzing causal mechanisms of populist voting. The report proceeds in two main parts and a concluding section. Part One is devoted to analysis of three types...

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...

Politicising Europe presents the most comprehensive contribution to empirical research on politicisation to date. The study is innovative in both conceptual and empirical terms. Conceptually, the contributors develop and apply a new index and typology of politicisation. Empirically, the volume presents a huge amount of original data, tracing politi...

Politicising Europe presents the most comprehensive contribution to empirical research on politicisation to date. The study is innovative in both conceptual and empirical terms. Conceptually, the contributors develop and apply a new index and typology of politicisation. Empirically, the volume presents a huge amount of original data, tracing politi...

Politicising Europe presents the most comprehensive contribution to empirical research on politicisation to date. The study is innovative in both conceptual and empirical terms. Conceptually, the contributors develop and apply a new index and typology of politicisation. Empirically, the volume presents a huge amount of original data, tracing politi...

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...

Online campaigning has become an important feature of contemporary elections. In European democracies characterized by strong political parties, Internet use also strengthens existing trends toward more candidate-centered campaigning. Focusing on the 2013 Austrian national election, this article systematically compares the use of three different on...

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...

The Austrian election held on 29 September 2013 resulted in all-time lows for both major traditional parties, the SPO and OVP, but they nevertheless secured their combined majority by a tiny margin. Whereas the populist radical right FPO was supported by every fifth voter, its split-off, the BZO, lost parliamentary representation. The Greens achiev...

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...

In this article we analyze how issue attitudes of Austrian voters and political elites are ideologically structured. Our mass and elite data are based on the Austrian National Election Study (AUTNES) and allow for direct comparisons of the demand side (voters) and the supply side (party elites). Testing four different models from the literature wit...

What are the consequences of globalization for the structure of political conflicts in Western Europe? How are political conflicts organized and articulated in the twenty-first century? And how does the transformation of territorial boundaries affect the scope and content of political conflicts? This book sets out to answer these questions by analy...

What are the consequences of globalization for the structure of political conflicts in Western Europe? How are political conflicts organized and articulated in the twenty-first century? And how does the transformation of territorial boundaries affect the scope and content of political conflicts? This book sets out to answer these questions by analy...

What are the consequences of globalization for the structure of political conflicts in Western Europe? How are political conflicts organized and articulated in the twenty-first century? And how does the transformation of territorial boundaries affect the scope and content of political conflicts? This book sets out to answer these questions by analy...

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...

What are the consequences of globalization for the structure of political conflicts in Western Europe? How are political conflicts organized and articulated in the twenty-first century? And how does the transformation of territorial boundaries affect the scope and content of political conflicts? This book sets out to answer these questions by analy...

About 30 years after gradually gaining parliamentary representation, Green parties have become established political actors throughout Western Europe. Based on a comparative analysis of 12 countries, this study argues that the stability this party family has achieved is the result of an enduring coalition with groups of voters who not only share a...

This article explores public debates regarding Islam and Muslim immigration in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. The authors are interested in which issues dominate the debates, which actors participate, which positions are taken, and which arguments are mobilised. Exploring three countries with an ethnic model of citizenship allows them to contro...

Die wachsende Präsenz muslimischer MigrantInnen und ihre religiös-kulturellen Forde-rungen an den Staat führen in vielen europäischen Ländern zu neuen Konflikten. Der vor-liegende Artikel untersucht die bislang wenig beachteten Fälle Österreich und Schweiz und konzentriert sich auf den Einfluss unterschiedlicher Partizipationsmodelle und Regulation...

The increasing presence of Muslim migrants and their religious-cultural claims towards the state engender new conflicts in many European countries. This article investigates Austria and Switzerland-two so far neglected cases- and focuses on the influence of different participation models and regulations concerning the relationship between religion...

Over the past three decades the effects of globalization and denationalization have created a division between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ in Western Europe. This study examines the transformation of party political systems in six countries (Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the UK) using opinion surveys, as well as newly collec...

In this article we analyse the extent, the form, and the thematic focus of political protest in Austria from 1975 to 2005. The developments of the 1990s and especially the protests against the formation of the OVP-FPO coalition government were understood to indicate a change towards a higher conflict intensity in Austrian politics. Based on finding...

'Die vorliegende Studie untersucht das Ausmaß, die Aktionsform und die thematischen Schwerpunkte des politischen Protests in Österreich von 1975 bis 2005. Die Entwicklungen der 1990er Jahre und vor allem die Proteste gegen die Bildung der ÖVP-FPÖ-Regierung im Jahr 2000 wurden vielfach als Indikator für einen Wandel hin zu einer höheren Konfliktinte...

Simon Bornscheir, Timotheos Frey, Hanspeter Kriesi en Romain Lachat zijn verbonden aan het Instituut voor Politieke Wetenschappen van de Universiteit van Zürich; Martin Dolezal en Edgar Grande werken voor het Geschwister Scholl Instituut voor Politieke Wetenschappen van de Ludwig-Maximilians-Universiteit in München.

  This article starts from the assumption that the current process of globalization or denationalization leads to the formation of a new structural conflict in Western European countries, opposing those who benefit from this process against those who tend to lose in the course of the events. The structural opposition between globalization ‘winners’...

This article starts from the assumption that the current process of globalization or denationalization leads to the formation of a new structural conflict in Western European countries, opposing those who benefit from this process against those who tend to lose in the course of the events. The structural opposition between globalization 'winners' a...

Since 1992 members of the Austrian parliament have been entitled to employ personal assistants ("ParlamentsmitarbeiterInnen"), whose salary is paid by public funds. A postal survey of the assistants shows that political conformity with the MPs is the starting point for recruitment and generally a precondition for the job. Most of the assistants pri...