Thomas Tichelbaecker

I am a postdoctoral fellow at TU Chemnitz in the team of Arndt Leininger, investigating legacies of democratic transition. Before joining Chemnitz, I completed my PhD at Princeton University in January 2026. You can download my CV here.

My research focuses on three interconnected areas: Political Elites & Party Organizations, Political Polarization, and Challenges to Liberal Democracy. Across these areas, I combine large-scale archival data with experimental and survey-based research designs to understand how political competition shapes representation and democratic stability.

In my dissertation, Taking Root, I examine how local party elites help new political parties building durable organizations. To collect novel candidate-level data from local elections in Germany, I developed TableOCR, a tool for extracting structured data from scanned documents.

My work has been published in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, and Public Opinion Quarterly. I have also co-authored a Cambridge Element in European Politics with Noam Gidron.