Qualification Details

• Education equivalent to five years at university level in Norway, with two years (120 credits) at Master’s level in a relevant field. The MA thesis must be equivalent to at least half a year’s workload, i.e. 30 ECTS.
• The Master’s degree must include relevant education in research methods.Other qualifications:
  • Norwegian or other Scandinavian language skills
  • English language skills

The evaluation of applicants is based on documented, academic qualifications and the research plan. Personal suitability, motivation, and compatibility with the rest of the project team are also considered. The most promising candidates are invited to an interview.

Responsibilities/Job Description

The Department of Political Science is recruiting a PhD Research Fellow (SKO 1017) with specialisation in the study of cabinet government in Scandinavia. The successful applicant will be part of the research project The Political Executive: Cabinet Government Praxis Between Laws and Norms (POLITEX), which is funded by the Norwegian Research Council. The person appointed may be given either a three year-appointment with no teaching requirement, or an appointment for a period of four years with a 25 per cent teaching requirement, depending on how the candidate’s competence fits in with the Department’s teaching portfolio.

The POLITEX project asks four questions: What are the functions of the cabinet? How does the cabinet make its decisions? What characterizes and shapes the role of the cabinet minister? And: How are norms about agenda setting, decision-making, and roles in the cabinet transferred to new office holders?

POLITEX combines sociological and historical perspectives with perspectives from political science and legal scholarship in studying the operation of cabinet government. In terms of research design, the project is in-depth, spatial and temporal. The most in-depth data will be collected for Norway, but considerable data will be collected for Sweden and Denmark, too, to accommodate spatial comparisons. The project's data collection components are interviews, a survey, document/archive study, and biographic data. More information about the project can be found here.

The PhD Fellow is expected to develop his/her own project within the project’s topical and geographical borders. We encourage a project proposal with a tentative overall thematic and theoretical framework and ideas for at least three academic articles. There is no preference for specific theoretical approaches. Also, there is no absolute requirement on the methodological approach, but the project has a preference for a PhD Fellow whose proposed project involves strong elements of quantitative methods. The candidate will be given access to data collected by the project but is expected to design a project with also additional data collection activities especially suited to the needs of the PhD project. Again, interested applicants are encouraged to contact the project leader to discuss tentative project ideas.

The successful candidate will be part of the Faculty’s PhD programme. The work is expected to lead to a PhD in political science.