Compare methods

	Content Analysis of Political Speeches	Operational Code Analysis
Field	International Relations	International Relations
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2013	1969
Originator	Content-analysis tradition; computational treatment by Justin Grimmer & Brandon Stewart	Nathan Leites (origin); Alexander George (construct); Walker, Schafer & Young (VICS)
Type	Systematic coding and computational analysis of political text	Content-analytic measurement of leaders' political belief systems
Seminal source	Grimmer, J., & Stewart, B. M. (2013). Text as data: The promise and pitfalls of automatic content analysis methods for political texts. Political Analysis, 21(3), 267–297.	George, A. L. (1969). The 'operational code': A neglected approach to the study of political leaders and decision-making. International Studies Quarterly, 13(2), 190–222.
Aliases	Political Speech Content Analysis, Foreign-Policy Text Analysis, Quantitative Speech Analysis in IR, At-a-Distance Speech Coding	Operational Code, Verbs in Context System (VICS), Belief System Analysis, Operational Code Construct
Related	3	3
Summary	Content analysis of political speeches turns the public words of foreign-policy actors — leaders' addresses, UN General Assembly statements, parliamentary debates, press briefings — into systematic, comparable measures. Spanning classic human-coded content analysis and modern text-as-data methods surveyed by Grimmer and Stewart (2013), it lets researchers quantify what leaders say: their threat perceptions, hostility, cooperative or conflictual orientation, issue priorities, and rhetorical positions, so that rhetoric can be tracked over time, compared across actors, and related to behavior.	Operational code analysis measures a political leader's belief system — their fundamental assumptions about the nature of politics and the best strategies for pursuing goals — from the leader's own words. Originating in Nathan Leites's study of the Bolshevik mindset and reformulated by Alexander George (1969) into a structured set of philosophical and instrumental questions, it later became a quantitative method through the Verbs in Context System (VICS). By coding how a leader talks about conflict, cooperation, control, and risk, analysts characterize the cognitive framework through which that leader interprets the world and chooses action.