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.

My research revolves around legislative debates, how elected officials talk with each other in parliaments, and how this relates to their voting behavior. I analyze mechanisms of policymaking and how political regimes change based on what issues politicians talk about and vote on. To do so, I approach the large parliamentary corpora such as the Congressional Record using large-scale text analysis.

Curriculum Vitae

Political Sociology • Computational Social Science • Analytical Sociology • Computational Text Analysis/NLP • Legislative Debates • Policymaking • U.S. Congress • Science of Science • Ethics of AI

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: I Built an Interactive Schedule for my Field's Largest Conference (and yours, too)

Published June 21st, 2025

Abstract: How do you communicate the what and where of various events at large conferences? This seems to be still a relatively unsolved problem, at least in the FOSS space. To properly navigate participants around the IC2S2 conference 2025 in Norrköping at my institute, I decided to build a flexible solution for this. In addition, it should work for any conference. So if you have to organize a conference at some point, this tool may come in very handy.

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.