Would you like to study political elites’ behaviour by conducting survey experiments and interviews with them? Join us as a postdoc to join the ERC-funded research project ‘Politicians under Radical Uncertainty: How Uncertain Phenomena Influence Political Elites’ Behavior’ (RADIUNCE), led by Professor Barbara Vis (PI) at
Utrecht University School of Governance (USG).
Your jobRADIUNCE (2023-2028) starts from the observation that politicians face numerous phenomena that are characterised by uncertainty, such as climate change, digitalisation, and pandemics. Some of these phenomena are characterised by resolvable uncertainty that can be reduced with more or better information while other phenomena are radically uncertainty and cannot. RADIUNCE’s overall aim is to develop a theory that explains politicians’ behavioural responses to both radically and resolvably uncertain phenomena—something about which surprisingly little is known. Theoretically, RADIUNCE adopts a multidisciplinary approach, integrating insights from political science, public administration, decision theory, psychology, and behavioural economics. Empirically, the project focuses on four countries with different opportunities and constraints for responding to uncertainty: Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States. It uses an innovative multi-methods design: survey experiments, automated text analysis, interviews, Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), and process tracing.
As a postdoc, you will work on the part of the project that sets out to explain variation in individual political elites’ responses to both radically and resolvably uncertain phenomena. Our first analyses reveal that politicians display a variety of such responses, ranging from avoiding the phenomenon, to relying on rules of thumb (heuristics), to adopting a comprehensive approach. We will build on these results and examine how politicians’ individual characteristics shape their responses. To this end, and in collaboration with other researchers in RADIUNCE, you will collect original data from political elites at the subnational level in all four countries and at the national level in the two unitary ones (the Netherlands and the UK) by means of survey experiments. Co-designing and conducting these survey experiments will be your main task. In addition to the experimental part, the surveys will include questions measuring politicians' individual characteristics, such as their ideology and personality. The surveys with the national level politicians will be administered in-person during a semi-structured interview. Conducting and qualitatively analysing these interviews will be another main task of yours.
Your main tasks will be to:
- co-design, conduct, and analyse survey experiments with politicians at the subnational level in RADIUNCE’s four countries;
- co-design, conduct, and analyse survey experiments with politicians at the national level in the Netherlands and the UK;
- conduct and analyse interviews with national level politicians in the Netherlands and the UK;
- (co-)author papers based on this research to be presented at major conferences and to be submitted to international refereed journals.
- (co-)organise a multidisciplinary RADIUNCE conference;
- contribute to policy briefs and other valorisation activities aimed at the wider public (e.g., blogs, op-eds).
You will become part of an enthusiastic team, collaborating with the researchers in RADIUNCE including the PI, three PhD candidates, three supervisors, and research assistants, as well as with other researchers from Utrecht University School of Governance and beyond. Within our team, your initiative and input are highly valued.