Postdoctoral Scholarship Holder in Computational Political Science

**Job Description**
The Department of Political Science at the University of Antwerp is seeking a full-time postdoctoral scholarship holder to contribute to the European Research Council-funded DEMO-LIES project. This project, “Deception in Democracy: Political Lying Accusations and Their Effects on Democratic Citizenship,” investigates how political elites use accusations of lying and disinformation, public perceptions of such accusations, and their impact on democratic attitudes and behaviors. The role involves developing and applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods, building relational datasets to map disinformation accusations in parliamentary debates, and generating insights for high-impact publications. The project employs a mixed-method approach, combining advanced quantitative text analysis, including large language models, with qualitative focus groups and surveys to comprehensively analyze elite-driven and citizen responses to political disinformation.

**Skills & Abilities**
• Strong skills in automated text analysis and natural language processing (e.g., machine learning including neural networks, relation and entity extraction, classification, and topic modeling).
• Comfortable with programming and analysis in R, including tidyverse, reticulate, tidymodels, etc.
• Comfortable programming in Python and working with relevant NLP/ML libraries (e.g. spaCy, scikit-learn, Transformers, TensorFlow, or PyTorch).
• Experience with collecting, cleaning, and annotating large text corpora.
• Excellent command of English in both speaking and writing.
• Advantageous: Experience with parliamentary debate data or other political text corpora.
• Advantageous: Familiarity with comparative politics, political communication, or democratic theory.
• Advantageous: Knowledge of multilingual NLP approaches.
• Advantageous: Experience in publishing in leading scientific journals.
• Advantageous: Strong collaborative skills for team-based research.
• Advantageous: Experience with Linux systems.

**Qualifications**
Required Degree(s) in:
• Political Science
• Computational Social Science
• Linguistics
• Computer Science
• Related field
(PhD must be obtained by start date)

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