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Research Assistant Position: Part Time Research Assistant to Didi Kuo, Center Fellow, CDDRL
Research Project Title: Democratic Backsliding, Programmatic Decay, and Governance
Research Project Description: This research project seeks to understand whether or not there has been 'programmatic decay,' or a shift in politics from being policy-oriented to being driven by non-policy considerations. In the process of democratization, programmatic competition has long been considered important: parties and leaders need to offer different sets of policies to voters in elections. While parties continue to compete on policy differences throughout many advanced democracies, there is ongoing debate about whether those policy disagreements are over economic or cultural values. This research seeks to better understand those policy differences and relate them to governance and democratic backsliding. It involves conceptualizing what programmatic decay means, theorizing its determinants and consequences, and then finding indicators of programmatic decay to collect data and conduct historical, qualitative, and quantitative analysis. The research assistant will work 10 hours/week on a variety of research tasks. These include: 1) maintaining and updating annotated bibliographies of relevant literature on governance, political parties, polarization, democratic backsliding, and populism; 2) researching the way political parties (in the United States and Europe) draft their party programs; 3) compiling party platforms and campaign speeches; 4) tracking and categorizing legislation from the past 20 years in both Congress and state legislatures related to economic or cultural policies. The RA should also be flexible; occasionally the research may change to include new research tasks tangentially related to the core research topics. RA might also be asked to check out and return books from the library. Optimally the RA would work through winter and spring quarters. They will meet weekly with faculty to discuss their work, and they are expected to provide feedback and ideas.
Qualifications/Skills Required of Research Assistant: Prior experience with academic research, including familiarity with electronic databases, and distinguishing academic books/articles from other types of publications. Highly organized, timely, and willing to ask questions. Able to conduct descriptive analysis of data; basic proficiency with Stata or R.
Duration: Winter quarter, may be extended to Spring quarter
Compensation: Undergraduate RAs working Winter/Spring quarter will be hired as part-time hourly employees at CDDRL and will be paid via payroll at a rate of $18 per hour for a maximum of 10 hours per week.
Interested candidate should apply on Handshake - Job #9515486.