Your function The postdoctoral fellow will work within the framework of the ERC funded research project “Protest, Public Opinion and Electoral Preferences: how protest propels political change (PROPEL)” led by Ruud Wouters.
PROPEL asks: What is it in public opinion that gets affected by protest?
And, when and how does this impact materialize?
To address these questions, the
PROPEL team seeks to develop and test a political communication theory of protest-public opinion (PPO) impact.
We scrutinize how the features of protest (size, disruption, organizer, claim), the mechanisms of mediatization (mass and social media) and politicization (reactions of political actors in the public sphere), and the features of citizen receivers (predispositions) drive four types of public opinion effects (issue-specific, system-generic, group-identity and party preference).
To that end, we will link extant protest and survey data, field panel surveys surrounding upcoming protests, execute vignette experiments, and engage in quantitative content analyses of mass and social media.
Doing so, we investigate the implications of protest in an era of shifting cleavage politics.
A summary of the research project can be found here.
Bullet point summary of the postdoctoral function: • You will develop an ambitious and innovative research agenda within the framework of
PROPEL • You will strongly contribute to the integration of protest event and survey data, as well as to the design, implementation and analysis of panel survey data.
• You will co-author academic and non-academic outputs from the project.
• You will collaborate with other project members (PhDs, principal investigators and co-investigators) and contribute to project management.
• You will present findings at national and international conferences, help organize workshops, and support team meetings and events.
Your team The
PROPEL team consists of a Principal Investigator, a post-doc and three phd-students.
The team is embedded within research group R4D (Research for Digitalization, Diversity and Democracy) at the School of Social Sciences of Hasselt University.
R4D is a young and dynamic interdisciplinary research centre focusing on three societal grand challenges and their interaction: digitalization, diversity and democracy.