Research Assistant: Democracy & Data Science (Part-Time)

University of Melbourne; City of Melbourne; On-site; AUD 68,000 - 92,000; Part time

Benefits offered by this job

17% superannuation

Salary packaging

Health and wellbeing programs

Professional development opportunities

Flexible work arrangements

Diversity and inclusion initiatives

Parental leave

Cultural leave

Melbourne Theatre Company discounts

Job summary

University of Melbourne is seeking a part-time Research Assistant to support an ARC DECRA project analysing illiberal political speech and democratic backsliding. The role involves scoring speeches, benchmarking outcomes against coded data, and contributing to interdisciplinary computational social science research.

You will work with a collaborative research team, manage tasks and deadlines, and participate in meetings to discuss coding challenges and model performance.

Qualifications

• Developing expertise in political science or a closely related discipline with research experience.
• Experience with quantitative or qualitative methods and empirical political research.
• Clear written and verbal communication; ability to collaborate in diverse, collegial teams.
• Interest in computational social science and basic coding in R or Python.

Responsibilities

• Score political speeches using a detailed codebook to validate and benchmark large language model outputs.
• Coordinate tasks and timelines with the research team to meet deadlines.
• Track working time across assignments and contribute to project reporting.
• Participate in team meetings, discuss coding challenges and model performance.
• Complete required university training and undertake other project tasks as directed.

Skills

Research experience

Quantitative methods

Qualitative methods

Writing skills

Time management

Attention to detail

Computational social science

R basics

Python basics

Collaboration

Education

Political science or related discipline

Tools

R

Python

Job description

University of Melbourne is seeking a part-time Research Assistant to support an ARC DECRA project analysing illiberal political speech and democratic backsliding. The role involves scoring speeches, benchmarking outcomes against coded data, and contributing to interdisciplinary computational social science research.

You will work with a collaborative research team, manage tasks and deadlines, and participate in meetings to discuss coding challenges and model performance.