Younghyun Lee

Welcome!

I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. I will be on the job market in the 2026-2027 academic year.

My research sits at the intersection of comparative politics, European politics, and migration & citizenship. I ask two questions: (1) how do immigrants politically integrate into host societies, and (2) how do democratic communities define who belongs? I apply experimental, observational, and computational designs to original large-scale data, combining causal inference with insights from extensive fieldwork in the context of rising anti-immigrant hostility. My dissertation examines how interactions with natives shape immigrants' own political integration in Belgium and Germany. My work has been published in Political Science Research and Methods and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

I was a doctoral visiting fellow at the Immigration Research Initiative (IRI) in Fall 2024 and at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES) in May 2025. I hold an M.A. in Political Science and a B.A. in French Literature and International Studies, both from Korea University.