Hendrik Erz, PhD
I'm a postdoctoral researcher at the
Institute for Analytical Sociology (IAS)
at Linköping University, Sweden.
I study legislative debates and political texts.
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 large parliamentary corpora such as the Congressional Record
using large-scale text analysis.
Political Sociology • Computational Social Science • Analytical Sociology • Computational Text Analysis/NLP • Legislative Debates • Policymaking • U.S. Congress • Science of Science • Ethics of AI
On October 20, 2025, I successfully defended my dissertation thesis at Linköping University. You can read more in the university's official press release.
Currently, I am involved in studying three distinct corpora: German and Swedish parliamentary debates to study discursive polarization; a corpus on computer science Security & Privacy research to study ethical behavior; and one on Swedish folkhögskolan to study how these schools have reacted to, and shaped large social shifts throughout the longue durée.
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 2026
Tap to view detailsMost Recent Article: A Modern Red Scare
Published October 4th, 2026
Abstract: A few weeks ago, there were two important regional elections in Germany. In the one in Saxony-Anhalt, the fascist party AfD gained over 40% of the votes. In the one in Berlin, the democratic socialists of the left gained over 20% of the votes. Since then, a modern red scare has flooded the opinion sections of many national newspapers, warning of a potentially "communist" government in Berlin. The victory of the fascist AfD has, in the meantime, been almost forgotten.
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.