Lukas Hetzer

I am a Research Associate at the Jacques Delors Centre at the Hertie School and part of the DFG-funded Research Unit “Reconfiguring Europe: Between Competence and Control”, where I work on the Coordination Project. I am also completing my PhD in Political Science at the University of Cologne.

My research focuses on European politics, political communication, public opinion, and crisis governance. I am particularly interested in how citizens, political actors, and institutions respond to political crises and broader political challenges, and how these responses shape European integration, political representation, and institutional change.

Methodologically, I work at the intersection of political science and computational social science. I use large-scale text data, computational text analysis, advanced survey designs, and (quasi-)experiments to study political discourse, public opinion, and political behaviour. I am also interested in building, linking, and analysing large-scale political datasets, particularly institutional text data from parliaments and EU institutions.

Before joining the Hertie School, I worked as a doctoral researcher at the University of Cologne and at GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, where I worked on election research and data-based knowledge transfer. I also held research assistant positions at the University of Amsterdam, Ghent University, and Humboldt University of Berlin. I hold an M.Sc. in Social Sciences Research from the University of Amsterdam and a B.Sc. in Social Sciences from Humboldt University of Berlin.

I also teach courses on quantitative methods, EU politics, and crisis politics.

Please feel free to explore my work and get in touch.