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 British Journal of Political Science. I have also co-authored a Cambridge Element in European Politics with Noam Gidron, published by Cambridge University Press.