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 dissertation is on economic policymaking in U.S. Congress. I try to understand how individual-level interactions in Congress have contributed to changes in the economic framework of the U.S. and the shared understanding of the economy. My aim is to allow sociological text analysis to use speech acts as a tool of analysis.

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 sciences. Find out at which conferences I'll be this year, and see my blog for bits and pieces on everything academic.

Conferences 2024

Tap to view details

Most Recent Article: Panic? Thoughts on the U.S. Presidential Debate

Published July 1st, 2024

Abstract: Last Thursday, the presidential candidates for the 2024 U.S. election met for their first public debate in Atlanta. The reactions to the debate were clear: It was a disaster for Biden. While I tend to agree, I think that the debate debacle rather points to a deeper crisis of the Democratic Party: A lack of vision, charismatic leaders, and a hostile environment to do politics in.

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.