Senior Researcher – Digital Team

Contract type: Permanent
Hours: Full Time (37.5 hours per week)
Salary: £36,093 – £40,166, negotiable based on skills and experience
Location: Whitehall, Greater London (Hybrid)
Line manager: Associate Director (Information Ecosystems)
Final date to receive applications: 10th August, 9am.

* The Demos Digital team is currently going through an exciting period of significant expansion, where we will be recruiting a number of additional roles in our team at a range of levels. If you are interested in our work on Resilient Information Ecosystems , but consider yourself to be:

• more senior than this role allows for; or
• have a background that is more focused on External Affairs/ Campaigning/ Network management; or
• are only interested or available for short-term, freelance opportunities or Demos Fellow opportunities,

Demos is Britain’s leading cross-party think tank producing research and policies that have been adopted by successive governments for nearly 30 years. Movements, ideologies and governments have come and gone, yet in this moment of global democratic emergency, Demos’s work could not be more urgent or relevant.

Our overarching mission is to upgrade democracy in the UK and build a system powered by trusting relationships, information and technology, fit for our times. We are designing the practical foundations of a new deal between citizen, state and the institutions that shape daily lives.

Demos’s dedicated digital research hub – Demos Digital – is a centre of excellence in digital policy and is home to the Resilient Information Ecosystems pillar and the thread of Trustworthy Technology which looks at how technology, from AI to social media, runs through all of our pillars. Our team’s recent work has covered AI chatbot ‘electoral hallucinations’ and political deepfakes, growing risks around new forms of digital foreign interference in the UK’s democracy, mapping AI–exacerbated information crises, and the culminating challenges driving a fragmentation in the UK around information and social consensus.

We are looking for a brilliant Senior Researcher with demonstrable experience and/or interest in tech and media policy to join our digital policy team.

As a Senior Researcher, your duties will include, but not be limited to:

• Independently writing high-quality policy papers, blogs and other outputs for a range of audiences and beginning to develop your individual profile.
• Using your experience in policy and/or research and understanding of the UK political environment to develop new and pertinent policy ideas.
• Project managing at least one project, whilst supporting other multiple projects simultaneously.
• Conducting high quality desk research and literature reviews to inform policy development.
• Confidently using qualitative and quantitative methods to undertake original research with the public and experts to inform evidence-based policy recommendations.
• Contributing actively to the development of new project proposals and participating in fundraising meetings.
• Nurturing and strengthening your existing relationships with potential partners relevant to your interests and work.
• Contributing to and in some cases leading the design and delivery of Demos Digital events (e.g. round tables, workshops, network meetings and panel events) with Parliamentarians, experts and industry stakeholders.

To get an idea of our work as a team and the Resilient Information Ecosystems pillar, we recommend reading some of the following papers we’ve published over the last year:

• Our New Deal essay :
  Resilient Information Ecosystems – Upgrading the information supply chain for democracy
• Fairer Feeds:
  Public Interest news, prominence rules, and the future of discoverability on platforms
• Our BBC: A blueprint for a more independent and future-proofed BBC
• Our back catalogue of Epistemic Security Network newsletters – here

You might be excited about this role if…

• you are passionate about conducting high-quality research (e.g. literature reviews, legal and policy analysis, surveys, focus groups etc.) in order to develop and advocate for policy ideas that will influence policy makers in Whitehall, Westminster and beyond. Our research is always…