Postdoc Research Position in Political Science/Computational Social Science

The University of Konstanz is a dynamic and internationally successful research university with approximately 10,000 students. The campus university’s architecture promotes interdisciplinary cooperation and a sense of community among researchers, lecturers and students. The University of Konstanz has been continuously funded by the German Excellence Strategy since 2006.

Addressing societal challenges such as technological change, population ageing, and climate change requires long-term investment policies (LTIPs) whose benefits emerge over time. These include investments in education, infrastructure, and climate mitigation. Because LTIPs entail short-term financial and political costs, they are contested. IneqInvest examines how inequalities shape support for such policies and whether and why voters and collective actors differ in their support.

Against this backdrop, the project addresses the following key questions (see IneqInvest page for details):

How do socio-economic and ideological factors shape support for long-term investment policies? Do political parties amplify or moderate short-term demands from their voters? How do interest groups and social movements influence LTIP political debates and outcomes? Which actors and conditions facilitate or hinder the adoption of future-oriented policies?

The postdoc will work on mapping collective actors’ long-term investment policy positions; building on existing, extending, and analyzing corpus data. More specifically, our aim is to find out how parties, interest groups, and social movements position themselves on LTIPs, how the positions align with public attitudes, and affect policies. The position requires expertise in computational social science and/or text-as-data methods, excellent written and oral communication skills in English, and the ability to work independently and contribute proactively and effectively to team-based research.

Your Responsibilities

• Process and analyze political text;
• Contribute to research on future-oriented policy, broadly defined, through a focus on specific policy issues and fields (social investment, climate policy) as well as the future-orientation of language;
• Joint publication of project results;
• Be active in the project and the broader Cluster of Excellence.