Contentious Politics in the Digital Age (CoPoDi)

We currently welcome applications for the Graduate School Scholarship Program “Contentious Politics in the Digital Age” (CoPoDi) until November 25, 2024.

Please download the Call for Applications and refer to our Application & Admission page for further information.

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Research Program

For the program Contentious Politics in the Digital Age (CoPoDi), BIGSSS was selected by the DAAD to host four international PhD students in its Graduate School Scholarship Programme (GSSP). The first two fellows will start their PhDs in September 2025, two more will follow in September 2026.

The program’s primary aim is to investigate how digital technology and media influence political activism, social movements, and socio-political conflicts. A secondary objective focuses on assessing the value of new digital data sources and computational methods for analyzing the dynamics of political protest and activism. Additionally, the program places particular emphasis on the Global South, where the potential of digital data is especially significant due to media restrictions and risks faced by informants, although this is not its sole geographical focus.

Potential dissertation projects may address one/more of the following topics:

Social Media and Protest Dynamics: PhD research in this area focuses on the influence of social media in shaping protest movements. Key topics include:
- Exploring how social media platforms aid in mobilizing, organizing, and spreading protest movements.
- Analyzing communication patterns, sentiment, framing, and the spread of protest-related content on social media.
- Investigating government responses to online protests in non-democratic or authoritarian regimes, and the outcomes of such actions.
- Examining if social media usage in political activism enhances the representation of marginalized groups.
Text-Based Analysis of Political Discourse: This area involves scrutinizing political discourse and its significance in contentious politics using text-as-data approaches, utilizing both digital and traditional media. Research could explore:
- Tracing the framing and evolution of contentious issues in protests using digital media.
- Identifying linguistic features and sentiments in the online communication of various political actors in protest movements.
Audiovisual Communication in Activism: Research here delves into the impact of audiovisual content in political activism, particularly its role in mobilization and engagement. Potential topics are:
- Assessing how activists employ audiovisual content on new social media platforms for political messaging and support mobilization.
- Investigating the use of both online and offline media by activists, their interaction across different channels, and the resultant effects on political activities.
- Exploring the integration of traditional methods and digital tracking to study media usage beyond text.
Agent-Based Modeling of Protest Dynamics: Proposed PhD projects in this field aim to create and test agent-based models for simulating and predicting protest dynamics. Research themes could include:
- Identifying key factors and mechanisms influencing the success or failure of protests and applying these models to real-world scenarios.
- Utilizing agent-based simulations to understand the effects of government or policy interventions on protests, particularly in authoritarian settings with political risks for researchers and subjects.

The program has strong ties to Bremen’s Collaborative Research Centre 1342 Global Dynamics of Social Policy and the national Research Centre for Social Cohesion. Furthermore, there is an intense exchange with the fellows of our two other DAAD Programmes – Global Inequality, the Middle Classes and the Welfare State (GloWel) and Global Dynamics of Social Policy and Social Cohesion (GSPSC) – and the PhD students of the DFG-funded Research Training Group Social Dynamics of the Self.

Faculty Associated with the Program

All doctoral education at BIGSSS is geared at a good fit between the PhD projects of our fellows and the research focus areas of the faculty involved. We believe that doing a PhD is most fulfilling for all parties if there is a mutually shared and genuinely scientific interest in the projects. Therefore, all applicants of the CoPoDi program have to demonstrate a broad thematic fit between the dissertation proposal and the corresponding supervisors outlined research interests as listed below.

Prof. Dr. Hilke Brockmann

Hilke Brockmann’s research focuses on subjective well-being and politics, social inequality, and data science research. Subjective well-being is a proximate determinant of people’s agency and mobilization. Recently, she investigated the effects of migration on natives’ well-being, the polarized and mobilizing social media communication of elite politicians, and online wealth perception of ordinary citizens. Applicants who want to combine questions of social inequality or subjective well-being and social protest with data science methodologies like NLP, sentiment, image or audio analysis are very welcome.

Here are some research examples:

Which political discourse ends in echo chambers?
When does online communication trigger onsite political mobilization?
“They eat the dogs” – Perception of migrants on social media platforms
The mental health pandemic as a topic in political activism

Prof. Dr. Stephanie Geise

Prof. Dr. Sebastian Haunss

Sebastian Haunss is interested in research that integrates computational social sciences methods, and especially applications of quantitative text analysis and natural language processing with substantial research interests on social movements and protests.

Possible fields of research are:

Protests and social movements in the Global South: country or regional case studies, comparative research
Mobilizing and Protesting about Climate Change: especially with a focus on countries outside Europe
Global Issues, Local Protest: studies that address how local protests take up broader/global issues, preferably using protest event analysis
Protest and Social Cohesion: How do protests endanger or strengthen social cohesion?
Extending methods of social movement research by leveraging recent developments in natural language processing

Prof Dr. Sophia Hunger

Professor Hunger welcomes applications on protest and party competition with a special focus on the development and application of methods of Computational Social Science.

Possible research questions are:

What are the conditions and dynamics under which social and protest movement are successful – either in terms of policy outcomes, public support or media attention/reporting?
How do challenger parties influence the dynamics of party competition in established political systems?
How can methods of Computational Social Science be used in order to measure concepts of interest for the Social Sciences?

Dr. Mandi Larsen

Dr. Larsen welcomes applications which examine questions related to the digital public sphere, particularly those grounded in theory and applying a critical and gendered lens. Possible research topics could include:

How are digital platforms impacting engagement in the public sphere, particularly in the Global South?
Do digital platforms allow for a more diverse political discourse?
Do they increase mobilization in political social movements?
How is communicative power changing with access to digital technology and media?
What are the consequences for social cohesion?

Prof. Dr. Jan Lorenz

Jan Lorenz is doing research in Computational Social Science and Social Data Science. The main goal is understanding social mechanisms for emerging societal phenomena like polarization, radicalization, filter bubbles, segregation, and mass protests. Social data science is used to quantify these phenomena using various data sources. From the toolbox of computational social science agent-based modeling and computer simulation is used to study the functioning of potential models explaining and exploring the conditions of their emergence and possible intervention. Potential dissertation topics and questions can be:

Polarization:

How polarized are opinion in different countries on different aspects of polarization?
What mechanisms drive polarization?

Segregation:

How spatially segregated are different societies with respect to multiple criteria like ethnicity, socio-economic status, or political attitudes? Are they increasing or decreasing?
What is the long term fate of societies where segregation mechanisms are at play on ethnicity, socio-economic status and political values? Do they spur or mitigate each other?

Protests:

How do protest movements build up and die out and how do their topics change on the way?

Filter Bubbles:

How does the political landscape change through information redistribution in social media?

Prof. Dr. Martin Nonhoff

Martin Nonhoff holds a professorship in political theory. He focusses on theories of radical democracy, power, hegemony, political discourse and all kinds of political antagonism (see also: Research Training Group "Contradiction Studies"). He also has an interest in social movements and their relations to political parties.

Possible research topics can center on:

The construction of hegemonies in and around political/social movements
Theoretical questions of political discourse and hegemony
Political theory of contradiction(s)
Conceptions of democracy in political struggle
Postcolonial criticism and democracy

Prof. Dr. Cornelius Puschmann

Cornelius Puschmann welcomes dissertation proposals on the interplay of digital media use (e.g., social media, online news) and attitudinal factors in the context of activism. In particular, he is interested in methodologically innovative work in relation to these questions:

What are the patterns and dynamics of communication, including stance, framing, and circulation of protest-related content on social media?
What is the relationship between broad/narrow information repertoires and political extremism?
To what extent does political engagement via social media relate to other forms of political engagement?
What characteristics in users are associated with an affinity for online misinformation?