Franz Rothenbacher (born 14 December 1954 in Schelklingen) is a German sociologist.
For the next year and a half he was research assistant at the special research group 3 Microanalytic Foundations of Social Policy, Frankfurt a.M. and Mannheim (Sonderforschungsbereich 3 Mikroanalytische Grundlagen der Gesellschaftspolitik).
From mid-1982 until 1988 Rothenbacher worked as lecturer and research fellow at the chair for sociology of Wolfgang Zapf at the Faculty for Social Sciences of the University of Mannheim.
Rothenbacher in the beginning was interested in the long-term analysis of social change in Germany, also known as modernization.
The research tradition of modernization (Peter Flora) and of the territorial structuring of Europe (Stein Rokkan) formed the basis for extensive long-term and comparative data collections for the European countries which appear in the data handbook series The Societies of Europe.