Cornelius Erfort
Welcome!¹ I am a Postdoc at Witten/Herdecke University, working on the DFG funded project zweitstimme.org. I'm also affiliated with the Humboldt Governance Lab.
My research sits at the intersection of comparative politics and quantitative methods. I study voter targeting, interest groups, and voting behavior, with a broader interest in how democratic representation works in practice—and how political competition, information, and organization shape whose preferences are heard.
Beyond individual papers, I care about building research infrastructure that others can use. With PARTYPRESS, providing data is important to me: I want to create lasting value for the research community through transparency, reproducibility, and open data (and, where possible, open-source workflows). I’m especially interested in innovative data sources and new ways of measuring politics—treating data as something we can discover in many places, not only in familiar datasets, and turning it into well-documented resources that others can reuse and build on.
Cornelius Erfort
¹ This page adapts the welcome text using browser data—I research how parties tailor content to voters. All processed locally.
I research how political actors target and tailor content to voters. To raise awareness, I apply a small, transparent form of tailoring on this site. The content you see may differ slightly based on time of day, time zone (which often hints at country or region), language, device type, or battery status—the kind of signals platforms and campaigns use, often invisibly.
Privacy: All tailoring happens in your browser. I have no access to your data and do not store it anywhere.
Transparency: Some people prefer not to be targeted with tailored content (Gahn 2024), which is why you can turn it off above and see exactly what changes. But note: while you see your tailored content and can switch to the default, you cannot see what content other users see. Hidden tailoring is problematic because it can manipulate without consent, create filter bubbles, and make it hard to compare what others see. But tailoring can also be helpful—personalization can improve relevance. That's why you can choose to keep it on.