About the project
This PhD uses computational social science to study political discourse, public opinion, and democratic participation. You may combine text-as-data, surveys, experiments, social media, audio, or other digital data, developing a project around your substantive interests while gaining advanced quantitative and computational skills in an interdisciplinary research environment.
Digital platforms, political debates, public consultations, and democratic innovations generate data about how people communicate, form opinions, and participate in collective decisions. Yet computational methods do not provide neutral measurements: researchers must decide what can be inferred from political communication, how methods should be validated, and how computational findings connect to social-science questions.
In this PhD, you will develop and evaluate computational approaches to political discourse, argumentation, public opinion, or democratic participation. You could work with text, speech, social media, surveys, consultation data, or multimodal political communication. Methods may include natural language processing, large language models, audio-as-data, network analysis, computational experiments, crowdsourced annotation, and mixed-method evaluation.
You will have flexibility to shape the research question, data, and methodological contribution. Directions include analysing arguments and evidence in public debate; measuring polarisation, deliberation, or communication style; examining how digital platforms structure participation; evaluating large language models in political contexts; or designing AI systems that support, structure, or moderate democratic participation.
The project may contribute methods, datasets, evaluation frameworks, or evidence about interactions between computational systems and society, drawing on Web Science, Computer Science, Political Science, and related disciplines.
Aligned with Rebooting Democracy, the project builds on research in multimodal political analysis, public reasoning, and AI-facilitated deliberation. You will work across computer science and political science, developing computational skills alongside research design, interpretation, and methodological judgement.
You will receive interdisciplinary training in computational social science, research design, quantitative and qualitative methods, responsible data use, and reproducible research.
Depending on the project, training may include Python or R, natural language processing, machine learning, survey and experimental methods, audio or multimodal analysis, and mixed-method evaluation.
You will join the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science, ranked 12th in the UK for Computer Science in the Complete University Guide 2027, and connect with interdisciplinary research communities through the Web Science Institute, the Centre for Democratic Futures, and Politics and International Relations.
Professional-development opportunities may include teaching experience, engagement with the Alan Turing Institute and Responsible AI UK, and support from Future Worlds to explore the commercial potential of your research.
The School of Electronics & Computer Science is committed to promoting equality, diversity inclusivity as demonstrated by our Athena SWAN award. We welcome all applicants regardless of their gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation or age, and will give full consideration to applicants seeking flexible working patterns and those who have taken a career break. The University has a generous maternity policy, onsite childcare facilities, and offers a range of benefits to help ensure employees’ well-being and work-life balance. The University of Southampton is committed to sustainability and has been awarded the Platinum EcoAward.
