Postdoctoral Position in Computational Social Science

The start date is November 1st, 2026 or by agreement. The position is available for two years. In principle, this position can be divided into two part-time positions.

The position is available as part of the project \"Keeping Up with Geopolitics: Using AI to Track the Global Rise of Nationalist Mobilization\" . The project studies the dynamics of nationalist protest using newly developed coding methods based on Large Language Models (LLMs) and is a collaboration between researchers at ETH Zurich (Professors Livia Schubiger and Lars-Erik Cederman) and the University of Konstanz (Professor Nils B. Weidmann). It is funded jointly by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) and the German Research Foundation (DFG).

The successful applicant will be involved in obtaining and processing source texts for events coding, the setup and customization of LLMs, and conducting research within the project’s framework. The working language is English.

• Development and extension of a data collection on political mobilization and protest
• Analysis of social media images using computer vision
• Design, analysis, and presentation of research results

• PhD in Political Science, Computer Science or a related discipline
• A strong research background in computational social science, in particular in the application of LLMs for social science coding
• Solid training in programming (Python) and statistics (R)
• Strong written and oral communications skills in English

• An excellent international project team
• A project that studies a highly relevant issue using computational tools
• Good development opportunities, extensive training and an attractive remuneration package

The University of Konstanz is committed to ensuring an environment that provides equal opportunities and promotes diversity, as well as a good balance between university and family life. As an equal opportunity employer, we strive to increase the number of women working in research and teaching. We also support working couples through our dual career programme. Persons with disabilities are explicitly encouraged to apply. They will be given preference if appropriately qualified.

Job description automatically summarized using AI