Biography

Julia Leschke is currently finishing her PhD in Political Science at the Department of Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science. During her PhD Julia was a visiting fellow at Humboldt University Berlin. Prior to this, she obtained an MSc in Politics Research from the University of Oxford and obtained a BA in Social Science from Humboldt University Berlin, including one academic year at University College London. She has been funded by the LSE studentship and the German Academic Scholarship Foundation, and won several prizes and grants, such as the EUSA Ernst Haas Fellowship, the Phelan US Centre Summer Grant, and the STICERD Small Grant, among others. She has taught courses on parties, research design, data science and machine learning.

In her PhD thesis Julia develops an approach to measure populist and anti-populist positions in multilingual texts to explain their variation across time and parties, as well as an approach to understand the effects of spatial exposure to out-groups on voting behaviour. Julia's substantial research interest is in the causes and measurement of political positions and ideologies of political actors, as well as political attitudes and behaviour; her methodological interests focus on multi-lingual quantitative text analysis, machine learning, causal inference and innovative applications of geospatial network analysis. As a Max Weber Fellow, Julia will examine the causal effects and measurement of authoritarian indoctrination in education on democratic attitudes.