Hendrik Erz | Hendrik Erz

A picture of me Hi, I'm Hendrik! I'm a PhD Student at the Institute for Analytical Sociology (IAS) at Linköping University, Sweden.

Curriculum Vitae

Political Sociology • Computational Social Sciences • Analytical Sociology • Computational Text Analysis

In my dissertation, I focus on policymaking in U.S. Congress. I explore both the Congressional discourse and the voting behavior of representatives to understand how individual-level interactions between representatives work together, influenced by institutional context, to produce the policy we observe. I use computational text analysis tools, such as topic models, word embeddings, and BERT-models to explore the link between speech and voting behavior across a century of Congressional speech (1873–2011).

Academic Research

I am affiliated with the Institute for Analytical Sociology (IAS), Linköping University, Sweden. My research intersects with political and economic sociology, text analysis and computational social science. Find out at which conferences I'll be this year, and see my blog for bits and pieces on everything academic.

Conferences 2025

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Most Recent Article: Lying to your Research Subjects, and other avoidable ethical pitfalls

Published May 9th, 2025

Abstract: Two weeks ago, a scandal shook the research community. Researchers from the University of Zürich have conducted an experiment and drawn in the ire of an entire Reddit community. While much has already been said about the problems of this study in particular, I want to take today to reflect more broadly on the state of ethics in the research community. Because I believe we can, and should, do better.

Open Source development

When I'm not analyzing policymaking and individual behavior in parliaments, I advocate for Open Source. Since at least 2006 I have been a user, supporter, and contributor to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS).

My main project is Zettlr. It is a "one-stop publication workbench" targeted at students and researchers in the arts and humanities. I started working on it in 2017 and have been the project lead ever since.

After the Twitter-exodus began, I started the go-to list for finding your peers, Academics on Mastodon. It lists hundreds of people from dozens of fields and Mastodon instances so that you can orient yourself in this new social media.

You can find more info on my involvement with software on my GitHub profile.