Eike Mark Rinke

Eike Mark Rinke is a Lecturer in Politics and Media in the School of Politics and International Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Leeds since 2019. He also serves as Co-Director of the Centre for Democratic Engagement, School Open Research Lead, and Local Network Lead for the UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN). Previously he was a post-doctoral researcher at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES) and a visiting scholar at the University of Washington and İzmir University of Economics.

Education

• Dr. phil. Media and Communication Studies – University of Mannheim
• MA Media and Public Affairs – George Washington University
• BA Communication Studies and Social Sciences – University of Erfurt

Research Interests

Rinke’s work straddles empirical and normative dimensions of political communication. On the micro-level he examines how individual journalists and citizens discuss political events, while on the macro-level he evaluates the democratic quality of these discourses across campaigns, protests, and everyday life. A second major strand involves meta-research and open scholarship: he studies transparency, reproducibility, and the sociology of scientific practices, leading initiatives such as the UKRN Leeds hub, BITSS Catalyst activities, and SocArXiv moderation.

Publication Trends

Across the past fifteen years his peer-reviewed output has shifted from agenda-setting, framing, and anti-Americanism (2011-2016) toward open-science advocacy and meta-research (2019-2024). Recent high-impact articles in PNAS and Nature Human Behaviour illuminate hidden analytical variability in social-science findings, while comparative projects in International Journal of Press/Politics dissect outrage and civility in global public debates. Computational methods—topic modelling, sentiment analysis, multi-analyst designs—feature prominently in this corpus.

Scientific Awards & Recognition

• ICA Outstanding Dissertation in Political Communication (2017)
• ICA Gene Burd Outstanding Dissertation Award (2015)
• AAPOR Burns “Bud” Roper Fellow Award (2016)
• APSA Political Psychology Distinguished Junior Scholars Award (2015)
• University of Leeds Research Culture Award – Open Research Practices (2024)

Advising & Grant Activity

Rinke supervises undergraduate and postgraduate modules on political communication and meta-research, and welcomes PhD applications in media & democracy, public deliberation, journalism studies, and open scholarship. While specific grant numbers are not provided, his coordination of 161 researchers in the PNAS many-analyst study illustrates capacity to secure large-scale collaborative funding.

Labs, Teams & Networks

• Co-Director, Centre for Democratic Engagement
• Member, Centre for Contemporary Political Theory
• Local Network Lead, UK Reproducibility Network
• BITSS Catalyst, Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences
• Moderator, SocArXiv open preprint archive
• Editorial Board member, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication
• Associate Editor, Political Communication