Lea Heyne is a political scientist and research fellow at ICS, with a PhD in Democracy Studies from the University of Zurich (2018). She also holds a BA in Political Science and Sociology from the University of Göttingen (2011), and an MA in International Affairs from Sciences Po Paris and the Free University Berlin (2013). She has previously worked as a research assistant at the Berlin Social Science Centre (WZB) and the NCCR Democracy project in Zurich and has been a visiting scholar at the Universities of Irvine (CSD-UCI), Mannheim (MZES) and Rio de Janeiro (IESP-UERJ).

Her work focuses on the relationship between democratic quality, political attitudes, and electoral behaviour. Her current research aims to understand how democracies can remain relevant and responsive to their citizens in a context of deepening economic and political integration. She works with quantitative methods, especially surveys and survey experiments, and is a member of the ICS/ISCTE opinion polls team.

From 2019-2021, she was a post-doctoral researcher in the ERC MAPLE project, and from 2021-2025, she was an FCT funded junior researcher. Since 2025, she is an integrated research fellow at ICS. She was PI of the FCT project TINA, which explored the relationship between economic choice perceptions and democratic support (2022-2024). She coordinates and teaches various courses on democratic quality, political attitudes and research methods in the Comparative Politics PhD program at ICS. She is also a co-founder of the association DemocracyNet.