Compare methods

	Event Data Analysis	Manifesto Coding	Qualitative Comparative Analysis
Field	Political Science	Political Science	Political Science
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	—	2001	1987
Originator	Conflict-studies and computational-social-science traditions (McClelland, Schrodt, King)	Manifesto Research Group / Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP/MARPOR)	Charles C. Ragin
Type	Automated coding and analysis of who-did-what-to-whom event records	Quantitative content analysis of party manifestos	Set-theoretic, configurational comparative method
Seminal source	Schrodt, P. A. (2012). Precedents, Progress, and Prospects in Political Event Data. International Interactions, 38(4), 546–569.	Budge, I., Klingemann, H.-D., Volkens, A., Bara, J., & Tanenbaum, E. (2001). Mapping Policy Preferences: Estimates for Parties, Electors, and Governments 1945–1998. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780199244003	Ragin, C. C. (1987). The Comparative Method: Moving Beyond Qualitative and Quantitative Strategies. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN: 9780520058347
Aliases	Event data coding, Political event data, Conflict event data, CAMEO event coding	CMP coding, MARPOR coding, Manifesto content analysis, Party manifesto coding	QCA, csQCA, fsQCA, Configurational comparative method
Related	3	4	3
Summary	Event data analysis converts streams of news reports into structured records of political interactions — who did what to whom, when — and aggregates them into time series of cooperation and conflict between actors. Each event is coded as a source actor, an action type drawn from an ontology such as CAMEO, a target actor, and a date. Modern systems extract these events automatically from millions of news stories, enabling near-real-time measurement of interstate and intrastate behavior for forecasting and analysis.	Manifesto coding is the quantitative content-analysis methodology of the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP/MARPOR) for measuring parties' policy preferences from their election manifestos. Trained coders break each manifesto into quasi-sentences and assign every unit to one of a fixed set of policy categories. Counting how often each category appears yields salience measures, and combining pro- and anti- categories produces position scores such as the left–right RILE index, giving comparable estimates of party positions across more than fifty democracies since 1945.	Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) is a set-theoretic, configurational method that identifies which combinations of conditions are necessary or sufficient for an outcome across a set of cases. Developed by Charles Ragin, it treats each case as a configuration of set memberships, builds a truth table of all logically possible combinations, and uses Boolean algebra to minimize them into the simplest expressions that account for the outcome. It bridges qualitative case knowledge and cross-case generalization, embracing causal complexity through conjunctural causation, equifinality, and asymmetry.