POST DOC RESEARCHER HORIZON PROJECT RESPOND

We are seeking to appoint a Researcher to work with Prof. Cyril Benoît (CNRS, Sciences Po) and in contact with Prof. Mihaly Fazekas (Central European University) in the project “Rescuing Democracy from Political Corruption in Digital Societies” (RESPOND) of the Horizon Program funded by the European Commission. 

The RESPOND project proposes a novel interdisciplinary assessment of political corruption, seen here as conducts and acts, often proliferating in grey zones regarding legality, that results in decision-making bias and exclusion in the policy cycle. It does so by: 1) analyzing four contemporary and relevant forms of political influence (political finance, lobbying, revolving doors/personal ties and media capture); 2) evaluating how political corruption is understood by political elites and citizens and is socially constructed through media and education; 3) exploring how established and emerging digital technologies entangle with political corruption and how they improve anti-corruption and pro-integrity strategies at both national and cross-border levels; 4) engaging in co-creation with relevant stakeholders to design, test, and revise practices and tools including new risk indicators developed by RESPOND, to increase civic monitoring and integrity in current democracies.

The Sciences Po-CEU teams will be responsible for the most extensive empirical data-collection work package in the project. The Postdoctoral Research Fellow is expected to primarily contribute to data collection and empirical analyses, facilitating the systematic measurement of corruption and favoritism in policymaking. This entails assembling, in collaboration with research assistants, large-scale micro-level datasets on legislative and regulatory processes across various countries, as well as actively participating in the design and validation of a series of corruption risk indicators. The research endeavors are geared towards producing high-quality publications, drafting and submitting research reports to the European Commission, and organizing social impact activities in co-creation with civil society and institutions.