Yeonju Lee submitted the dissertation, "Democracy Without Redistribution: The Sense of Injustice, Perceived Inequality, and Preferences for Redistribution," which examines why high levels of income inequality do not lead to greater demands for redistribution in many democracies by looking at the gap between actual and perceived income inequality. Lee explains why this gap arises, what it means, and how it relates to the redistributive puzzle in comparative perspective. She identifies the mechanism of how people define and come to perceive economic inequality and its political implications including support for redistribution and leftist parties with progressive tax policies. In doing so, Lee shows and explains why and how people in different countries are politically sensitive to different kinds of injustice which lead them to perceive economic inequality in certain ways.

Lee is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, and is also affiliated with the Weatherhead Research Cluster on Comparative Inequality and Inclusion. She received a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 2018.

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