Lea Elsässer is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Socioeconomics at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. Her research focuses on the relationship between social inequality and political representation. More specifically, she is interested in the consequences of unequal political representation for welfare state restructuring. She studied economics and social sciences at the Eberhard-Karls-University Tübingen, at the University of Cologne, and at Universidade Nova in Lisbon, Portugal. During her time as a PhD student, she was a visiting research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany, and a visiting doctoral researcher at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. For her dissertation studies, she held a PhD scholarship from the German Academic Scholarship Foundation.