Junior Specialist / Assistant Specialist - Economics - Department of Economics

Salary range:
The UC academic salary scales set the minimum pay determined by rank and step at appointment. See the following table for the current salary scale(s) for this position: Represented Specialist Salary Scales. The current full time base salary for this position is $55,000 - $63,500. "Off-scale" salaries, which yield compensation that is higher than the published system-wide salary at the designated rank and step, are offered when necessary to meet competitive conditions.

Percent time:
100%

Anticipated start:
07/01/2026

Position duration:
1 year with the possibility of Reappointment

The Junior/Assistant Specialist will help Nicolas Longuet-Marx in the conduct of several of his research projects in political economy, focusing on the innovation and diffusion of policies across states over time, the drivers of political realignment, and the interaction between labor market factors and political behavior. Tasks will include data collection, data cleaning and processing, and data analysis.

Duties will include:

• Collecting recent and historical data on American Political Economy, including, but not limited to, precinct-level election results, precinct shapefiles, general election and primary candidate websites, candidate survey data, and campaign contributions. The data will be collected from various sources, including but not limited to, Secretaries of state, county election officials, the Federal Election Commission, the US Census Bureau, and the Library of Congress.
• Processing the above described datasets, together with other datasets already collected by the Principal Investigators. The processing will include, but not be limited to, match precinct-level election results with their corresponding shapefiles using fuzzy-string matching, recover precinct-level demographics using GIS to obtain precincts' overlap with census block-groups, process census demographic datasets to obtain census block-group summary statistics, clean the text from candidate websites, etc.
• Using the datasets described above to produce summary statistics on voting behavior by precincts, and how it has evolved in the past 30 years, together with patterns on candidate polarization, and how they relate to precinct-level and district-level demographics. The research assistant will also study the correlation of these different patterns with the evolution of campaign finance laws in the US.
• Reviewing literature on targeted questions in American Political Economy, under the guidance of the Principal Investigators.

Basic qualifications (required at time of application)

Bachelor's degree (or equivalent international degree) or enrolled in a Bachelor's degree (or equivalent international degree) program

Additional qualifications (required at time of start)

Bachelor's degree (or equivalent international degree)

Preferred qualifications

• Prior experience with data collection, data processing
• Prior experience with data analysis in Stata, Python or, R.

Apply link:
https://aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05349

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