Österreichische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft (Journal)
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Frank Fischer (2017): Climate Crisis and the Democratic Prospect. Participatory Governance in Sustainable Communities
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Struggling to Address the ‘Big and Burning’ Questions: The Opportunities and Perils of (Austrian) Political Science Going Mainstream
Get PDFThis essay raises the question of whether mainstream political science fails to address adequately the important questions about the state of democracy that are dominating the current public discourse. Increasingly common research practices in mainstream political science focus on technical questions and puzzle-solving while incentivizing conventional approaches and narrow risk-averse scholarship. This threatens political science’s ability to contribute meaningfully to the public discourse. Under these circumstances, the Austrian branch of the discipline is joining mainstream international political science in a quest for greater relevance after decades of marginalization. The article traces the evolution of postwar international and Austrian political science, suggesting that the current focus on puzzle-solving is a reaction to previously dominant paradigms in the discipline that made grand claims on the basis of few data. The essay also shows that the delayed establishment of Austrian political science as an academic discipline and its long disconnect from international developments in the field long undermined its recognition. Now that it is becoming more mainstream and international, there are unprecedented opportunities for greater prestige but also new perils to be avoided.
Interdisciplinarity as a Source of Relevance for Political Science
Get PDFThis article seeks to shed light on the critical role of interdisciplinary qualities for the societal relevance of Political Science. It traces the historical development of Austrian Political Science embedded in the larger international context and by considering the cases of the United States, France, Germany and Italy. It serves as a means to demonstrate the close linkage between interdisciplinarity in Political Science and its professional, political and civic relevance. By addressing the question of Political Science’s societal relevance from a historical and cross-national perspective, it prepares the ground for consecutive studies that conduct in-debt comparative analysis
Cui Bono Scientia Politica? A Multi-Dimensional Concept of Relevance and the Case of Political Science in Austria
Get PDF Political scientists in many parts of the world have resumed the debate about the discipline’s societal relevance in view of manifold political and social challenges. Unlike their international peers, political scientists in Austria have so far not undertaken a thorough reflection of the relevance that their work has beyond academia. Our special issue seeks to fill this gap in the self-reflection of political science in Austria by opening a debate about the conceptual, empirical, normative, and praxeological dimensions of (societal) relevance. This introductory article prepares the ground for the subsequent contributions to the special issue by giving a brief overview of the current debate about the relevance of political science, formulating the research questions that guide the special issue, and introducing a multi-dimensional concept of societal relevance. Building on the work of Van Aalsvoort (2004) and Stuckey et al. (2013), the article distinguishes between civic, professional, and political relevance of political science and discusses the discipline’s historical development in Austria against the background of this conceptual framework.
Quality management in social sciences research. Quality management in the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE)
Get PDFAustria has been a member country of SHARE since its inception in 2004. In this paper, we address quality management in surveys and highlight three components – contract, sampling, and fieldwork management – that are fundamental for high data-quality. We provide an overview of a SHARE wave and discuss our approach to data-quality management based on the example of SHARE management in Austria. Results confirm that focusing on fieldwork quality management has the potential to improve overall data quality
The relevance of empirical political science in Austria: Ask important questions, study them rigorously, and let people know
Get PDFIn 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 empirical research in political science to become relevant: the importance of the problem under study, the generalizabilitiy of the findings, the appropriateness of the research design, and the extent to which it is communicated within the discipline and beyond. Based on these criteria we discuss steps that political scientists working not only in Austria but also on Austria can take to improve the relevance of their research.
