The digital age has produced extensive datasets documenting communication by political actors, the media, and civil society, indicating a shift in political discourse toward digital platforms. Election manifestos, for example, are now primarily distributed online through campaign websites. The accessibility of such data has increased due to advances in algorithm-based methods for collecting, storing, and analysing large volumes of digital empirical data. However, greater data volume brings increased complexity. These trends introduce methodological challenges in collection, pre-processing, and analysis. To address these problems, our paper proposes a human-in-the-loop blended reading workflow combining BERTopic with a large language model (LLM), demonstrated through a case study of German and Austrian national parliamentary election campaigns between 2002 and 2025. During this period, elections took place against the backdrop of multiple crises that threatened the European Union's internal security and democratic foundations. Scholars frequently employ the term permacrisis to characterise this persistent state of crisis and its associated challenges. With our explorative approach, we trace which issues are addressed by the Austrian and German parties in their communication through national election manifestos. This shall further allow us to detect policy fields and to analyse if EU permacrisis events are displayed.
This study explores political parallelism within the digital sphere by analyzing news-sharing behavior of political party actors on Twitter in Austria. Employing the concept of political parallelism, I investigate whether these alignments persist in the context of social network sites. Using Twitter data collected during the 2019 European Parliament and Austrian national election campaigns, alongside survey data from the Austrian National Election Study (AUTNES), the study assesses which media outlets are referred to by political actors and how ideological proximity influences these referrals. The findings indicate that political actors are more likely to amplify news from outlets whose readership aligns ideologically with their party, confirming the extension of traditional political parallelism into digital media environments. Furthermore, contrary to expectations, the results show that right-wing, nationalist parties do not necessarily use media referrals more selectively than mainstream parties. Finally, the findings suggest that political party actors use media referrals as opportune witnesses, to selectively amplify information that aligns with the party's political stance. These insights underscore the impact of political parallelism on political information environments and have implications for audience engagement in the digital sphere.
Austria's federal bureaucracy has long been characterized by a high degree of politicization. One largely overlooked aspect of this politicization is the appointment of (former) ministerial cabinet members to the influential position of department head (Sektionsleitung) within federal ministries. Using original data on all such appointments between 1970 and 2023 (N=547), this study shows that the share of department heads with cabinet experience has increased significantly-from roughly 10% in the 1970s to around 40% in recent years. Theoretically, three potential drivers of this trend are proposed: political expertise, party affiliation, and personal loyalty. Empirically, the findings point clearly toward a partisan logic. While a few department heads with cabinet experience are appointed by ministers from outside their own party, the vast majority are nominated by ministers from the same party. Only a minority are reappointed by the very ministers they once served. Thus, the politicization of department heads through cabinet recruitment primarily reflects partisan considerations, rather than personal ties or functional demands for political expertise.
Political science has long suffered from the limited ability to conduct experiments and observations in a controlled environment due to its subject matter-groups of people and societies. In this article, the authors explore the potential of survival games as a research tool and setting in political science, weighing their advantages and disadvantages. In the following parts of the article, they conduct an observation of violent and non-violent behaviour of players in the game Rust. This was done to not only prove the utility of games as research medium, but also to obtain new data and insight into the state of nature, a fundamental question of political science posed by Hobbes and Locke. The results show that in a totally anarchic environment of the game, which in certain aspects encourages violence by lowering the stakes, players nonetheless favour non-violent behaviour and defensive violence, rather than offensive violence.
Parliaments are arenas of political dispute, but at the same time they require a generally accepted basic consensus and its concrete implementation in organisational issues such as the design of the parliamentary agenda and the handling of procedural conflicts. To resolve such conflicts, many parliaments use coordination committees, consisting of members of the presidium and representatives of the parliamentary groups. The article at hand analyses the Presiding Conference (PK) in the Austrian National Council as such a coordination committee on the basis of detailed interviews with its members. What role does the PK play in setting the agenda in the National Council andwhat mechanisms does it use to establish and reproduce a basic procedural consensus? The analysis shows that the PK and the preparatory informal round of club directors primarily determine the National Council's timetable agenda and serve as a coordinating body for a wide range of procedural and organisational issues. The highly consensual interaction in the PK can be explained by six institutional mechanisms - personality-oriented or interaction-based - including the strict separation of procedural and political decisions, the orientation towards precedents, the anticipation of obstruction possibilities, a consensus-oriented understanding of members' roles and the repeated interaction in a small, confidential and highly professionalised group. These theoretical mechanisms can be generalised beyond the National Council and show how parliamentary organisation can promote stable and fair parliamentarism even under conditions of political polarisation.
