The Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB), research area Civil Society, Conflicts, and Democracy, research unit Democracy: Structures, Performance, Challenges seeks four junior research fellows for the time period from 1 October 2009 until 30 September 2012 with a weekly working load of 19,5 hours in the context of the project “MARPOR Manifesto Research on Political Representation”, financed by the German Science Foundation (DFG) long-term to analyse the quality of programmatic representation across 75 countries between 1990 and 2021 based on quantitative content analyses of parties’ election programs (see http://www.wzb.eu/zkd/dsl/pdf/Marpor.pdf).
Within MARPOR, the Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP) continues its international cooperation. The DFG supports the collection and content-analyses of the manifestos to make them publicly available by financing four fellowships for tackling the following tasks:
Position 1: Organising, documenting, and preparing the primary data and secondary data on election statistics, regime types, and government compositions for publication, corresponding contribution to the scheduled book.
Position 2: Training of coders, organising the reliability tests, and further developing the coder handbook, developing and carrying out the coder interviews, preparing secondary data on party preferences, own contribution to the scheduled book on quality of primary data.
Position 3: Comparing existing and developing new measures on policy preferences of parties, collaborating in setting up and maintaining the online database for texts and content analytical data, own contribution to the scheduled book on measuring policy preferences.
Position 4: Preparing secondary data on voters and contexts, matching party and voter data, applying existing and developing new measures on congruence between parties and voters, own contribution to the scheduled book on measuring the programmatic congruence between parties and voters.
Requirements for all four positions: Applicants should hold an M.A. or corresponding degree in political science or an adjacent science with a relevant theoretical (comparative election studies, comparative party or democratic theory) or methodological focus (computerised text, micro, aggregate data, time series cross-section analysis or web-based data retrieval), good knowledge of methods of empirical social research and statistical packages as well as high capacity for teamwork. Command of the English language is a precondition for tackling the comparative tasks of the project. Knowledge of all other languages, in particular Spanish, is very welcome, command of German language is not a prerequisite.
We prefer applicants who aspire to attain their PhD on research topics central to MARPOR and who want to contribute to planned project publications.
Salary for each position: In accordance with German civil service standards (E 13 TVöD)
Disabled applicants with equal qualification will be given preference.
The WZB expressly invites women to apply.
Candidates are kindly requested to submit their application and the usual accompanying documentation no later than 31 July 2009 to:
Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB)
Dr. Andrea Volkens
Reichpietschufer 50
10785 Berlin
