Thomas Tichelbaecker

Welcome!

I am a research fellow at TU Chemnitz in the team of Arndt Leininger investigating legacies of democratic transition. I am also a PhD candidate in the Department of Politics at Princeton University and am currently a visiting researcher at MZES Mannheim. Before joining Princeton and Chemnitz, I studied at Tübingen and Berlin. You can download my CV here.

In my dissertation, I examine the emergence of new political parties from an organizational perspective. In particular, I explore where new political parties are likely to build groundwork operations analyzing the role of bottom-up mechanisms, political elites, and local party competition.

Substantively, my research interests lie in political polarization, the composition and emergence of political elites as well as electoral discrimination. In my research, I use large, archival datasets and have developed TableOCR, a tool to facilitate data extraction from scanned images or documents. With this program, I collect novel data on candidates in local elections in Germany.

My research has been published in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science and Public Opinion Quarterly. A Cambridge Element in European Politics joint with Noam Gidron is currently in press with Cambridge University Press.