About
Christophe Lesschaeve is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Social Sciences, Faculty of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences, University of Luxembourg, where he has been affiliated since October 2017. His research examines political representation, voter-elites issue congruence, and the enduring effects of war on electoral behavior, particularly in Southeast European contexts.
He earned his PhD in Political Science from the University of Antwerp in 2016, where his dissertation investigated inequality in opinion congruence between privileged and underprivileged voters in Belgium. During doctoral studies, he participated in the PartiRep-Project funded by the Belgian Science Policy and conducted research at the University of Leiden supported by the Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (FWO).
Lesschaeve's scholarly focus bridges theoretical and applied political science, analyzing how war experiences shape party choices, voter attitudes toward veterans, and pandemic-related political behaviors. His work extends to practical democratic innovation through contributions to voting advice applications (Stemtest and Test Électoral) for Belgian elections, now utilized in educational settings to familiarize students with political parties.
Recent publications demonstrate methodological diversity across Southeast European case studies, examining war legacies through survey experiments, social network analysis, and comparative electoral data. Key thematic clusters include conflict-induced voting patterns, pandemic policy trade-offs, gender dynamics in postwar elections, and measurement innovations for representation inequality.
He currently leads research within the ERC-funded "Electoral Legacies of War" project while maintaining collaborations from prior Belgian Science Policy funding. His non-academic engagement includes designing civic education tools that translate complex political science concepts into accessible voter resources.
Lesschaeve operates within the Department of Social Sciences research ecosystem, contributing to Luxembourg's growing expertise in comparative electoral studies and conflict legacy analysis through data collection initiatives like the ELWar Expert Survey and BiHCorp parliamentary corpus.
