Lea Heyne is a political scientist and research fellow at ICS, with a PhD in Democracy Studies from the University of Zurich (2018). Her thesis was titled “Support for which kind of democracy? What European citizens want from their democracies, and why they are (dis)satisfied”. 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 (California) and Mannheim (MZES).

Her work focuses on political attitudes and behaviour, public opinion, survey methodology as well as democratic institutions and democratic quality.

From 2019-2021, she was a post-doctoral researcher at the ICS in the ERC MAPLE project led by Marina Costa Lobo. Since 2021, she is an FCT funded research fellow. She is PI of the FCT project TINA, which explores the relationship between economic choice perceptions and democratic support, and coordinates the Social Science Research Methods Seminar (SSRMS) as well as the Post-Graduate Seminar in Comparative Politics at ICS. She is also president and co-founder of the association DemocracyNet.