Research Associate for the Project "Which Public Sphere System for Democracy? - PSS4DEMOCRACY"

Start date01.05.2026 pending approval of external funding, fixed until 30.04.2030 (This is a fixed-term contract in accordance with Section 2 of the academic fixed-term labor contract act [Wissenschaftszeitvertragsgesetz, WissZeitVG]). Application deadline05.02.2026 Scope of workpart-time Weekly hours80 % of standard work hours per week

Your responsibilities

Duties include academic services in the project named above. Research associates may also pursue independent research and further academic qualifications. They may also pursue doctoral studies outside of working duties.

This project introduces a fundamentally new way of studying the public sphere by designing and testing models of algorithmic news supply that translate normative democratic ideals into experimentally observable news environments.

Public Spheres for Democracy: Journalism and Communication Studies, esp. Digital Journalism

As PhD Student, you will contribute to this approach by developing conceptual and empirical measures of public sphere principles and applying them to the systematic analysis of political news content.

Research

• conduct a systematic literature review on political public sphere models and news recommender systems (NRS)
• operationalize public sphere principles into measurable metrics for algorithmic news supply using computational methods
• analyze large-scale multilingual news corpora to assess political news performance, including party visibility, viewpoint diversity, emotionalization, and other indicators
• co-develop NLP-based metrics with manual validation
• present results at international workshops, conferences, and lead as well as contribute to publications in academic journals

Collaboration & Project Coordination

• work closely with an interdisciplinary team
• support and take over responsibility in project coordination

Your profile

A university degree in a relevant field.

You are an excellent early-career researcher with a strong interest in the intersection of journalism studies, political communication, and computational methods.

Do you have experience in Writing skills?, Do you have a Master's degree?, * a completed (or near completion) Master's degree in Communication Science, Journalism Studies, Political Science, Computational Social Science, or a related field

• strong knowledge of public sphere theories, democratic models, and/or political communication
• experience with empirical research, especially content analysis or computational text analysis
• familiarity with Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods or willingness to develop these skills (e.g., entity linking, stance detection, multilingual models)
• ability to work with large datasets, scrape or handle news corpora, and perform reproducible data analysis
• strong analytical, conceptual, and academic writing skills, * ability to work with large datasets, scrape or handle news corpora, and perform reproducible data analysis
• background in journalism research, news diversity, or media performance
• experience with Python, machine learning libraries, or multilingual NLP
• interest in algorithmic curation, recommender systems, or democratic theory
• ability to work independently, proactively, and collaboratively in an interdisciplinary, international team
• excellent command of English (written and spoken)
• command of German (written and spoken)
• Polish or Norwegian language skills are a plus

• Reliable remuneration based on wage agreements
• Continuing education opportunities
• University pensions
• Attractive location
• Flexible working hours
• Work-life balance opportunities
• Health management, EGYM Wellpass
• Educational leave
• 30 days of vacation per annum

Additional benefits:

• integration into a cutting-edge ERC project bridging communication studies, political theory, and computer science
• collaboration with internationally recognized researchers and access to state-of-the-art computational infrastructure
• support for conference participation, publications, and academic career development
• a dynamic, interdisciplinary, and supportive research environment

Universität Hamburg-University of Excellence is one of the strongest research educational institutions in Germany. Our work in research, teaching, educational and knowledge exchange activities is fostering the next generation of responsible global citizens ready to tackle the global challenges facing us. Our guiding principle "Innovating and Cooperating for a Sustainable Future in a digital age" drives collaboration with academic and nonacademic partner institutions in the Hamburg Metropolitan Region and around the world. We would like to invite you to be part of our community to work with us in creating sustainable and digital change for a dynamic and pluralist society.

The University of Hamburg is committed to equity. Diversity enriches our university life, whether in our studies, research, teaching, education, or workplace. We therefore welcome all applications, regardless of gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, ethnic or social background, age, religion or belief, disability, or chronic illness.

The University of Hamburg strives to increase the number of women in academia, and encourages qualified female academics to apply.

Severely disabled and disabled applicants with the same status will receive preference over equally qualified non-disabled applicants.