Thomas Tichelbaecker

Welcome!

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 and defended my dissertation in December 2025. You can download my CV here.

Substantively, my research interests lie in political polarization, the composition and emergence of political elites as well as the interplay of political demand and supply. 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.

In my dissertation, I examine the emergence of new political parties from an organizational perspective focusing on local party elites. In particular, I explore how these local party elites help to establish ties to local communities and to build durable local branches.

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.