The Department of Political Sciences has a vacancy for a PhD candidate in ‘Emotions in Political Communication’.

The PhD candidate will be working for POLEMIC, a project that analyses the causes and consequences of emotional political communication. The project is highly interdisciplinary combining automated text analyses of politician speeches with individual responses to communication, both at the attitudinal and physiological level. You will be working in a team of 5 people: two PhD students (to be hired), Gijs Schumacher (Principal Investigator) and Bert Bakker. Formally, you will work at the Department of Political Science.

The PhD candidate will analyse the emotional appeals that politicians make. The project has a comparative dimension (9 countries) and a temporal  dimension (1945-now). The PhD candidate will collect speeches and conduct automated text analysis on them. Among other things, the speeches will be used to analyse the emotion in a speech and the personality of the speaker. The dissertation should focus on explaining when and why politicians use (which) emotional appeals. In addition to that there is also ample space in the project for developing and implementing one’s own ideas, as long as these match with the broader topic of emotions in politics.  

Tasks

• Analyse emotional appeals by politicians;

• collect speech data;

• write a dissertation consisting of research articles;

• work in a highly interdisciplinary team;

• further develop the project using other data/methods or asking different questions;

• engage in more methodological training, at a summer school and/or an university abroad.

Teaching is optional, but encouraged.

• Master’s degree in Political Science or a Master’s degree in a discipline relevant to the project such as Psychology or Communication Science (candidates with another Master’s degree may apply, but should motivate why their experience suffices for this project);
• plenty of experience with with quantitative methodology, preferably also quantitative text analysis;
• programming skills in R, Python or another programming language;
• an interest in interdisciplinary work.

The appointment will be on a temporary basis for a period of 4 years for 38 hours per week. In the first instance, a contract will be given for 12 months. If positively evaluated, the contract will be extended for another 36 months. The gross salary is €2.222 during the first year, rising to €2.840 (on the basis of a full-time appointment during an eventual fourth year).

The successful candidate will begin their project on or around 1 October 2018. A later date is negotiable.

The Collective Labour Agreement for Dutch Universities is applicable.

University of Amsterdam

With over 5,000 employees, 30,000 students and a budget of more than 600 million euros, the University of Amsterdam (UvA) is an intellectual hub within the Netherlands. Teaching and research at the UvA are conducted within seven faculties: Humanities, Social and Behavioural Sciences, Economics and Business, Law, Science, Medicine and Dentistry. Housed on four city campuses in or near the heart of Amsterdam, where disciplines come together and interact, the faculties have close links with thousands of researchers and hundreds of institutions at home and abroad.  

The UvA’s students and employees are independent thinkers, competent rebels who dare to question dogmas and aren’t satisfied with easy answers and standard solutions. To work at the UvA is to work in an independent, creative, innovative and international climate characterised by an open atmosphere and a genuine engagement with the city of Amsterdam and society.

http://www.uva.nl/en/home

Department of Political Science

The Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences (FMG) of the University of Amsterdam (UvA) is the largest educational and research institution in the social sciences in the Netherlands, and one of the highest-ranked such institutions in Europe. The Faculty serves 7,500 students in numerous Bachelor’s and Master’s programmes in Political Science, Sociology, Anthropology, Communication Science, Psychology, Social Geography, Planning and International Development Studies, and Educational Sciences. The academic staff is employed in education as well as research. There are over 1,100 employees at the Faculty, which resides in a number of buildings in the centre of Amsterdam.

The Department of Political Sciences is one of the departments of the FMG. The College of Social Sciences (CSW) and the Graduate School of Social Sciences (GSSS) are responsible for the under-graduate and graduate teaching programmes in Political Science. The research within the Department is conducted in research programmes of the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR). The AISSR unites the social science research of the UvA, and is one of the largest research institutes in Europe.

http://www.uva.nl/en/disciplines/political-science