Chitralekha Basu is junior professor of Empirical Democratic Theory. Her research focuses on the design, operation, and performance of democracies. Her teaching introduces students to different theories of democracy (both classical theories and more recent thinking) and highlights the particular challenges that phenomena like inequality and globalisation pose for democratic nation-states. Both formal analysis and statistical methods are employed to examine these questions.

Prof Basu holds a PhD from the University of Rochester. Before becoming a professor at Cologne, she was based at the University of Barcelona, Princeton University, and the University of Nottingham.