Welcome!

I am currently a Hoover Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. I am also a Research Associate at the Governance and Local Development Institute at the University of Gothenburg and a Postdoctoral Affiliate at Stanford's Immigration Policy Lab. I obtained a Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University in 2021. Before joining the Hoover Institution, I was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University's Mamdouha S. Bobst Center for Peace and Justice and 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 transforms electoral politics and civil society in rich democracies. In the book I analyze voter attitudes, domestic migration patterns, and voting outcomes in Germany and the United States to show how domestic migration contributes to geographic polarization and creates significant yet little-acknowledged challenges for democratic functioning and stability. 

In a second book project, my co-authors and I demonstrate how different social institutions influence entry into and life in communities in southern Africa. We propose that even domestic migrants are often confronted with significant boundaries to entry. These boundaries shape how they interact with different authorities as well as community members, and how they access services and engage in politics.

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 or is forthcoming in the American Political Science Review, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), World Politics, the Journal of Politics, Democratization, the European Political Science Review, and the Journal of Economics, Race, and Policy, among others.

Prior to graduate school at 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 book projects. You can find my teaching history here. My CV is available here.

Please contact me via email at hlueders@stanford.edu. You can also find me on Bluesky and Google Scholar.