Postdoctoral Researcher · Erasmus University Rotterdam

Shreyas Meher

I study how governments control information online, and how democratic institutions erode.

As a postdoctoral researcher at Erasmus University Rotterdam, I pursue these questions on the TWIN4DEM project with Clara Egger and Asya Zhelyazkova, where we build machine learning frameworks that model democratic processes and stress-test institutional resilience, including digital twins of executive aggrandizement in parliamentary democracies.

My toolkit is computational: fine-tuned language models, text-as-data pipelines, and causal research designs. My work has appeared in Political Analysis, Research & Politics, and Behavioral Sciences, and my NLP models for political conflict were developed through the NSF-funded ConfliBERT project with Patrick T. Brandt. I earned my Ph.D. in Public Policy & Political Economy from the University of Texas at Dallas in 2025.

Digital Governance Computational Social Science NLP & LLMs Democratic Backsliding Reinforcement Learning

Explore my research Publications CV (PDF)

meher@essb.eur.nl
Rotterdam, the Netherlands

What I work on

Digital Governance

Who censors, and why? I study government content takedowns in democracies, internet filtering in autocracies, and the political economy of digital sovereignty.

Computational Social Science

I build specialized language models, such as ConfliBERT and ConflLlama, that turn unstructured political text into structured data for conflict research.

Democratic Backsliding

How do executives expand power inside democratic frameworks? I study legislative oversight, executive aggrandizement, and institutional resilience.

Selected work

Extractive versus Generative Language Models for Political Conflict Text Classification
Political Analysis, 2025 · with Brandt, Alsarra, D’Orazio, Heintze, Khan, Osorio & Sianan

ConflLlama: Domain-Specific Adaptation of Large Language Models for Conflict Event Classification
Research & Politics, 2025 · with Patrick T. Brandt

Building Capacity or Building Checks? What EU Enlargement Reports Emphasise and Democratic Backsliding
Working paper, EPSS 2026 (Belfast) · with Asya Zhelyazkova & Clara Egger

All publications →