New Visiting Reseacher at MOBILE - Maren Lüdecke
Maren Lüdecke is a third-year PhD student at the Cluster of Excellence “The Politics of Inequality” at the University of Konstanz, Germany. She works as a research assistant on the project “Administrative Inequality: The Case of Foreign Nationals in Germany”, which is closely tied to her dissertation. Her research focuses on the unequal treatment of asylum seekers by German administrative courts. Maren's work combines new court-level statistics about staff composition and proceedings with a novel corpus of 8,000 asylum appeal judgments. This allows her to examine how the composition of the judiciary contributes to divergences in court-level rejection rates, backlog, and the duration of proceedings. Using computational text analysis, she aims to explore whether the discrepancies observed in the statistics also manifest in the judicial opinion of an asylum appeal. She is particularly interested in credibility assessments, the treatment of specific applicant groups, and the use of sources (e.g., other judgments or country-of-origin information) in shaping legal outcomes.