Welcome!

I hold a Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University and am currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University's Mamdouha S. Bobst Center for Peace and Justice. I am also a Postdoctoral Affiliate at Stanford's Immigration Policy Lab and a Research Associate at the Governance and Local Development Institute at the University of Gothenburg. Before coming to Princeton, I was a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.

My research addresses fundamental questions of political participation and government responsiveness: why and how do citizens in both democratic and autocratic regimes participate in politics? And how and when do political authorities respond to the demands of citizens?

Much of my research answers these questions by linking political participation and representation to different forms of migration. I am currently working on a book project that demonstrates how domestic migration reshapes democratic politics. Part of this work is summarized in my job market paper. In addition, I study political participation and government responsiveness in the context of closed authoritarian regimes and from the perspective of unauthorized immigrants in the United States. This work asks how marginalized people navigate life and politics where they lack political voice by construction.

Through my research, I seek to contribute to important policy debates. I am proud that my work on unauthorized immigrants has informed reform efforts in the United States and was cited by numerous national and local newspapers, including the Editorial Board of The New York Times.

My research has been published in the American Political Science Review, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the Journal of Politics, Democratization, the European Political Science Review, and the Journal of Economics, Race, and Policy, among others.

Before coming to Stanford, I attended Heidelberg University in Germany, where I graduated with a B.A. and M.A. in Political Science, and spent two years as exchange scholar and Visiting Assistant in Research in the Department of Political Science at Yale University.

See here for more about my research, in particular a list of publications, my latest working papers, and information on my current research projects. You can find my teaching history here. My CV is available here.

Please contact me via email at hl1240@princeton.edu. You can also find me on Twitter and Google Scholar.