PhD Position at the Chair of Digital Governance, Department of Governance

Profs. Margaret E. Roberts and Yannis Theocharis are inviting applications for a PhD position (3 years) in the context of the project Transparency in Content Moderation.

Transparency in Content Moderation is a 5-year project led by Prof. Margaret E. Roberts (University of California, San Diego), and conducted in collaboration with Profs. Yannis Theocharis (Technical University of Munich) and Nils Weidmann (University of Konstanz). It is supported by Prof. Roberts’ Max Planck-Alexander von Humboldt Research Award. The project seeks to understand the current state of transparency in content moderation on major social media platforms, test how different types of transparency affect downstream users and investigate how content moderation systems may be strategically subverted for nefarious aims.

The position – starting September 1, 2023 – will be based at TUM’s Chair of Digital Governance, a research and teaching unit at the Munich School of Politics and Public Policy (Hochschule für Politik München) and the Department of Governance which is its corresponding department within the TUM School of Social Sciences and Technology. The Chair’s research agenda is interdisciplinary and has a particular interest in the application of advanced quantitative and computational methods to tackle a broad range of questions at the intersection of digital media and politics.

Successful applicants will be expected to support the project leader and collaborators with data collection and data analysis, project coordination and administrative tasks related to the project’s operation (e.g. coordination of research assistants). They will be involved in the project’s publication output and are expected to develop and carry out their own PhD project related to the broader focus of the project.

Your Qualifications

• A Master’s degree in political science or a related social science discipline or interdisciplinary field
• Skills in quantitative methods. Experience with experiments and knowledge of causal inference techniques, text-as-data methods and machine-learning is an asset
• Using R is a must, skills in Python an asset
• Ambition to work on a project focused on a current heated topic, eagerness to make both theoretically exciting and empirically important contributions and apply cutting edge research methods
• Enthusiasm for working in a team as well as ability to work independently
• Strong ability to communicate in spoken and written English (applicants who do not have a degree from an English-language university or program, please indicate proficiency)

Your Responsibilities

• Create a database of content moderation policies and social media posts
• Conceptualize and theorize about types of transparency
• Conduct cutting-edge research and publish in top journals jointly with the research team
• Actively participate in the intellectual life and research activities of the project, the Chair of Digital Governance and the TUM School of Social Sciences and Technology
• Collaborate with other project and Chair members

Our Offer

• A doctoral research position in a vibrant research team for 3 years.
• Remuneration will be in accordance with the German public service pay scale (collective agreement for state-level public servants, TV-L) at the E-13 level (75%).
• An exciting research environment with many international collaborations and ongoing cutting-edge research projects.
• Funding support for conferences, additional training, research activities

How to Apply

Please send the following materials electronically and as a single pdf file to digitalgovernance@hfp.tum.de:

• A motivation letter which gives a sense of your scholarly and career interests
• A current CV, including list of publications if available
• Academic transcripts providing specific information about all of your university-level coursework and/or a list of courses that is informative about your substantive and methodological preparation, including the level at which each course was taken and the grade obtained;
• If not readily apparent from the official transcripts, documentation of all degrees obtained; if you have not yet completed your Master ́s degree, please indicate date of completion and award
• A research paper or other analytical writing sample published in English
• A list of two academic references who can speak to your qualification for doctoral research.

The application deadline is April 3, 2023. For questions, please contact Prof. Yannis Theocharis at yannis.theocharis@tum.de