Cornelius Erfort

Postdoctoral researcher in political science. Voter targeting, interest groups, and voting behavior.

cornelius.erfort@uni-wh.de Google Scholar ORCID GitHub Bluesky LinkedIn CV (PDF)

Cornelius Erfort

About

I'm 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.

Current research

  • Voter targeting — how parties tailor digital ads across platforms, audiences, and issues.
  • Issue agendas — using the PARTYPRESS database to study how parties respond to public opinion and competitors.
  • Election forecasting — Bayesian forecasting of German and subnational elections with zweitstimme.org.
  • Climate & politics — public and political engagement as part of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change.

Publications

    See the full version for abstracts, BibTeX, and replication data.

    Teaching

    • Automated Web Data Collection — PhD workshop, DYNAMICS, HU Berlin (2025, 2026). Syllabus 2026.
    • Automated Web Data Collection & Text as Data — MA seminar, HU Berlin (2023).
    • Comparative Politics and International Relations — BA seminar, HU Berlin (2022).

    Working papers

      Data & software

      • PARTYPRESS — multilingual database of party press releases with supervised issue classifications. Code on GitHub, models on Hugging Face.
      • zweitstimme.org — Bayesian forecasting model for German federal elections.