Postdoctoral Positions in Personality Cults and Strategic Communication in Autocracies

The Department of Political Science at Aarhus University invites applications for three two-year full-time postdoctoral researchers to join a research team studying the logic and consequences of strategic communication and leadership cults in contemporary autocracies. The projects are headed by Associate Professors Jakob Tolstrup (Aarhus University) and Alexander Baturo (Dublin City University). Start date is flexible throughout September 2026-February 2027, or upon mutual agreement.

The postdoctoral positions are embedded in two large research projects:

CULTS is a €800K 5-year research project (2026-2030) funded by the Danish private fund, the Velux Foundation. The project is about the drivers, characteristics, and consequences of personality cults in contemporary autocracies. CULTS aims to produce the first-ever systematic analysis of the dynamics of authoritarian personality cults and their consequences. Utilizing, among others, the latest advances in text-as-data methods, it will provide: i) detailed descriptions and explanation of leadership cults in contemporary Russia and China, including a systematic inquiry centering on how public communication of political elites plays in fostering, nurturing, and consolidating cults around the dictator; ii) new cross-country measurements of personality cults and/or leader glorification; and iii) comparative analysis of the causes and consequences of cults across larger samples of authoritarian regimes in the post-Cold War period.

Communicating Dictators is a €830K 4-year research project (2026-2029) funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark. The project examines how dictators, the central actors in every autocracy, communicate in public. It sets out to better understand how autocrats – through the things they say and do in public – try to influence perceptions of regime strength, durability, and resolve among their supporters and opponents to secure and consolidate their position. The project analyzes both rhetorical and performative aspects of dictators’ communication, and it seeks to explain how and why such communication changes across different strategic contexts (such as during different types of crises). Utilizing, among others, text-as-data methods, and survey experiments, the project will engage in: i) Fine-grained data collection of a subset of post-Cold War autocrats’ (primarily from the post-Soviet region) public rhetoric (speeches, statements, comments) and appearances (whom they meet with, when, and where); ii) Within-case and cross-case analyses of how dictators’ public communication changes across different strategic contexts; and iii) State-of-the-art survey experiments on how the public in autocracies respond to the various types of communicative signals from the dictator.