Research Assistant

**Job Description**
Aarhus University invites applications for a 1-year Research Assistant position within the SLOMODEMO project, an ERC Advanced Grant led by Professor Kees van Kersbergen. This project investigates how accelerating technological, social, and life-pace changes (“social acceleration”) impact liberal democracies’ problem-solving capacity and democratic quality across eight countries from 2000-2024. The Research Assistant will contribute to the “Theorizing, Operationalizing, and Measuring Social Acceleration” work package, focusing on developing a combined formative-reflective measurement model of social acceleration and building a comprehensive cross-national dataset.

**Skills & Abilities**
• Advanced skills in quantitative and computational areas
• Keen interest in dataset creation and model measurement
• Clear, careful coding and documentation; able to balance speed with reliability
• Programming and data work: R or Python; regular expressions; data wrangling libraries; Structured Query Language (SQL)
• Web and text data: web scraping; application programming interfaces (APIs); natural language processing (NLP); machine translation
• Modelling and measurement: statistical modelling; supervised machine learning; measurement and validation for formative and reflective constructs
• Workflow and sharing: Git and GitHub; reproducible environments; clear documentation (readme files and codebooks)
• Visualisation: plotting libraries (e.g., ggplot2 or Matplotlib) and simple dashboards

**Qualifications**
Required Degree(s) in:
• Political Science
• Data Science
• Economics
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Related field

**Experience**
Other:
• Completed MA degree (by the start date)

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