Hi, I'm Hendrik! I'm a researcher at the
Institute for Analytical Sociology (IAS)
at Linköping University, Sweden.
I study 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 (PDF)
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
Tap to view detailsMost Recent Article: Vibe Coding: The Final Form of Hyper-Individualism
Published November 29th, 2025
Abstract: A few days ago, I had to deal with the first "vibe coded" PR to my software. In this article, I reflect on this encounter, and analyze the social habitus of the "vibe coder." I conceptualize "vibe coding"—inexperienced users generating complex code via AI tools—as the final manifestation of hyper-individualism. Drawing on sociological frameworks, I argue that this practice disrupts open-source norms by producing unreviewable, high-impact PRs that ignore community standards and technical context. While motivated, their output reflects a "tragedy of the lone producer" who sacrifices meaningful engagement for isolated productivity. This trend can threaten software integrity and community health.
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.