1 postdoctoral position on ERC funded project POLSTYLE

Organisation/Company Université de Namur Department Research Institute Transitions Research Field Political sciences Researcher Profile Recognised Researcher (R2) Positions Postdoc Positions Final date to receive applications 15 Aug 2026 - 23:59 (Europe/Brussels) Country Belgium Type of Contract Temporary Job Status Full-time Hours Per Week 38 Offer Starting Date 1 Oct 2026 Is the job funded through the EU Research Framework Programme? Horizon Europe - ERC Reference Number  Is the Job related to staff position within a Research Infrastructure?

No

POLSTYLE project (ERC starting grant ).

The Research Institute Transitions (Research team in Democratic Transformations) is pleased to announce a vacancy for one postdoctoral researcher (f/m) in comparative politics. The project POLSTYLE is funded by a European Research Council Starting Grant and coordinated by Prof.
Jeremy Dodeigne (UNamur).

New trends or old habits?

Stability and changes of political styles since 1960

Hardly a week goes by without reports of political officials using inflammatory language and viciously attacking their opponents. The mainstreaming of toxic rhetoric has been deeply restructuring politics over the past years. Amid a broader restyling of politics, various scholars have argued that such communication styles directly undermine the democratic functioning of our societies. The central claim of the POLSTYLE project is that not all forms of hostility are equal.

Political conflicts are the lifeblood of democracy: they allow – and even require – heated disagreements, including at times uncivil exchanges between partisan rivals. By contrast, elected officials relying on discourses promoting violence and intolerance are fundamentally incompatible with pluralistic democracy. In other words, the danger for modern democracy lies not in the rise of polarization per se, but in its shifting nature over the past years.

Following the seminal distinction from agonist political theory: partisan rivals cease to be ‘adversaries to oppose’ and become ‘enemies to be eliminated’.

To test this thesis, the POLSTYLE project makes ambitious empirical, methodological, and theoretical breakthroughs. Empirically, we analyze the evolution of political styles in European democracies since the 1960s. The project has collected unique datasets across television debates, parliamentary discourses, and social media posts. Conceptually, the project relies on the innovative framework of the Political Hostility Scale (PHOS) that covers multiple indicators from an interdisciplinary scholarship (including political psychology, cognitive linguistics, and political communication).

PHOS was developed jointly with internationally leading scholars to track democratic erosion using 16 fine-grained indicators. Methodologically, our team implements cutting-edge deep learning and natural language processing (NLP) techniques to study long-term transformations in political communication. Finally, the project adopts a theory building approach to explain how political styles have unfolded differently depending on institutional, political, and media-system factors, while investigating its effects on democratic erosion (including experiments with voters).

Postdoctoral position in comparative politics

The successful candidate will join a team of four postdoctoral researchers and one PhD candidate with expertise in legislative politics, social media communication, intolerant rhetoric and computational linguistics, with strong expertise in NLP.

At this stage of the project, all data collection processes are completed or in the final stages of completion (Parliamentary debates in 12 countries, TV archives and distinct X/Twitter datasets). Our research team has developed multiple deep learning models for data analysis - including Natural Language Inference (NLI) for detection of group appeals, political hostility communication, and morality threats. Prior experience with computational text analysis and NLP is welcome but not required, as the project provides extensive computational support and existing analytical infrastructures.

Research tasks

The postdoctoral researcher…