Publications

Journal Articles

2025

1. Electoral Discrimination, Party Rationale, and the Underrepresentation of Immigrant‐Origin Politicians

   Daniel Auer, Lea Portmann, and Thomas Tichelbaecker

   American Journal of Political Science, 2025 Abstract Media Replication files

   Tagesanzeiger. “Wähler und Parteien diskriminieren Kandidaten mit ausländischen Namen”.

   Immigrants and other minorities are underrepresented in politics in most Western democracies. We argue that strategically acting party gatekeepers who update their nomination strategies based on voter behavior contribute to this representation gap. Drawing on unique panel data from Swiss local elections, we find that candidates with a “foreign‐sounding” name systematically receive not only fewer votes but are also fielded on less promising list positions compared to native candidates. We track candidates across elections and show that this inequality is driven by voter discrimination in previous elections. Our study carries relevance for research on minority candidates by linking different stages in the electoral process and showing how parties indirectly discriminate due to their use of candidate‐performance information. It also bears practical implications, pointing to avenues how parties can break the cycle of discrimination in the electoral process.

2. Does Political Violence Undermine Descriptive Representation? The Case of Women in Politics

   Jey Alizade, Fabio Ellger, Marius Grünewald, and Thomas Tichelbaecker

   European Journal of Political Research, 2025 Abstract Replication files

   Do attacks against politicians affect the descriptive representation of women? Studies suggest that female candidates are more likely to become targets of political crime, but little is known about the consequences for descriptive representation. To study this question, we combine analyses of observational data measuring crimes against politicians with evidence from a survey experiment. Examining German local elections, we demonstrate that attacks against politicians are not associated with fewer female candidates on party lists. In addition, our survey experiment, using a sample of likely candidates, shows that exposure to political crime does not reduce willingness to run for office or engage in politics among female respondents. If anything, our findings suggest that political violence might reduce the gender gap in local politics. Our results highlight resilience among female candidates in face of increasing political violence.

3. Beyond Observational Relationships: Evidence from a Ten-country Experiment That Policy Disputes Cause Affective Polarization

   Noam Gidron, Will Horne, Thomas Tichelbaecker, and James Adams

   British Journal of Political Science, 2025 Abstract Replication files

   While scholars document associations between competing parties’ policy disputes and citizens’ cross-party hostility, that is, affective polarization, we lack causal comparative evidence of how different types of ideological disagreements shape partisan affective evaluations. We investigate this issue with a priming experiment across ten Western publics, which prompts some respondents to answer questions inviting them to discuss debates over either cultural or economic issues versus a control group that receives a non-political prompt. Respondents in the economic and cultural priming conditions expressed greater distrust of out-partisans, and, among respondents who received cultural priming, those who discussed immigration in their open-ended responses expressed far more distrust towards opponents – an effect driven by right-wing respondents who discussed immigration. These findings provide comparative evidence that economic and cultural debates cause affective polarization, with immigration as a primary cultural driver.

2024

1. War and Nationalism: How WW1 Battle Deaths Fueled Civilians’ Support for the Nazi Party

   Alexander De Juan, Felix Haass, Carlo Koos, Sascha Riaz, and Thomas Tichelbaecker

   American Political Science Review, 2024 Abstract Media Replication files

   TAZ. “Je mehr Kriegstote, desto mehr NSDAP-WählerInnen”.
   KATAPULT Ausgabe 34 / 2024, p. 68. “Kriege stärken rechtsnationale Parteien”.

   Can wars breed nationalism? We argue that civilians’ indirect exposure to war fatalities can trigger psychological processes that increase identification with their nation and ultimately strengthen support for nationalist parties. We test this argument in the context of the rise of the Nazi Party after World War 1 (WW1). To measure localized war exposure, we machine-coded information on 7.5 million German soldiers who were wounded or died in WW1. Our empirical strategy leverages battlefield dynamics that cause plausibly exogenous variation in the county-level casualty fatality rate—the share of dead soldiers among all casualties. We find that throughout the interwar period, electoral support for right-wing nationalist parties, including the Nazi Party, was 2.6 percentage points higher in counties with above-median casualty fatality rates. Consistent with our proposed mechanism, we find that this effect was driven by civilians rather than veterans and areas with a preexisting tradition of collective war commemoration.

2023

1. What Do We Measure When We Measure Affective Polarization across Countries?

   Thomas Tichelbaecker, Noam Gidron, Will Horne, and James Adams

   Public Opinion Quarterly, 2023 Abstract Replication files

   Measures of affective polarization—that is, dislike and hostility across party lines—have been developed and validated in the context of America’s two-party system. Yet increasingly, affective polarization is examined comparatively. We address this issue by introducing a novel dataset that measures aspects of partisan affect in 10 countries with diverse party systems. We detect associations between partisan affect toward out-parties versus affect toward out-parties’ supporters, but their strength varies across countries. We discuss measurement reasons for this variation and consider the implications of our findings for the emerging comparative affective polarization literature.

Books

2025

1. The European Ideological Space in Voters’ Own Words

   Noam Gidron, and Thomas Tichelbaecker

   Cambridge University Press, 2025 Abstract

   There is a broad consensus among scholars that the ideological space of Western democracies consists of two distinct dimensions: one economic and the other cultural. In this Element, we explore how ordinary citizens make sense of these two dimensions. Analyzing novel survey data collected across 10 Western democracies, we employ text analysis techniques to investigate responses to open-ended questions. We examine variations in how people interpret these two ideological dimensions along three levels of analyses: across countries, based on demographic features, and along the left-right divide. Our results suggest that there are multiple two-dimensional spaces: that is, different groups ascribe different meanings to what the economic and cultural political divides stand for. We also find that the two dimensions are closely intertwined in people’s minds. Our findings make theoretical contributions to the study of electoral politics and political ideology.

Work in Progress

2026

1. Taking Root: How New Parties Mobilize Voters and Build Organizations

   Thomas Tichelbaecker

   2026 PDF
2. Who Reaches across the Aisle?

   Lea Portmann, and Thomas Tichelbaecker

   2026
3. Still competing for loyalists?

   Thomas Tichelbaecker, and Arndt Leininger

   2026
4. Guarding the State: How Militant Democracy Constrains the Far Right

   Thomas Tichelbaecker, and Jey Alizade

   2026
5. Cross-Ideological Vote Splitting – Measuring Political Polarization with Electoral Data

   Lea Portmann, and Thomas Tichelbaecker

   2026