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[Filled position] Post-doc researcher position (24months)

The project “Neo-authoritarianisms in Europe and the liberal democratic response” (AUTHLIB), jointly led by the Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics (CEE) and the médialab is hiring a Post-doc researcher for 24months.

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The AUTHLIB project

The “Neo-authoritarianisms in Europe and the liberal democratic response” (AUTHLIB)  project’s basic premise is that liberal democracy faces not one challenge but many challenges and that therefore we must comprehensively consider the challenges that have emerged across and within countries in Europe in recent years. To do the AUTHLIB project carefully and systematically explores the varieties of illiberalism. Illiberalism has diverse ways of appealing to elites and to highly varied citizens, through narratives, programs and policies, emotional appeals, and institutional innovations, and it has developed methods of diffusion, each of which needs to be understood and mapped. In line with the varieties of illiberalism and their diverse diffusion channels the policies to mitigate and combat them need to be appropriate to the nature of the challenge in a given context.

The project “Neo-authoritarianisms in Europe and the liberal democratic response” (AUTHLIB) is funded by the European Commission within the Horizon Europe framework.

Research team

The Researcher will work with Profs. Jean-Philippe Cointet, Caterina Froio, Romain  Lachat and Jan Rovny. 

Main task

The Sciences Po team will be responsible for the most extensive empirical data-collection work package in the project. The Postdoctoral Research Fellow will be expected to contribute mainly to the data collection and empirical analyses which maps ideological configurations and dimensions by analyzing party documents, speeches of public figures  and social media activity of engaged citizens and by the conducting expert-surveys on the orientation of political actors. The research work will be aimed at the preparation of high-quality publications, drafting and submission of research reports to the European Commission, and organization of social impact activities in co-creation with civil society and institutions in Hungary and at the European level.

Skills and qualification:

  • PhD in Political Science, Sociology, Data Science or related  disciplines (completed or to be defended within max 6 months after the  application).
  • Excellent knowledge of R or Python programming
  • Very good skills in text and (optionally) network analysis methods
  • Experience in text-as-data methods (e.g., dictionary analyses, supervised machine learning, topic modeling, word embedding).
  • Interest in or some background knowledge in the study of democracy would be an asset, but is not required.
  • Excellent written and spoken language skills in English.
  • Strong interest in academic research, ideally proven through  international publications and/or collaboration in research projects.
  • Ability to work effectively, both independently and collaboratively, in an international team.