Projects | Kenneth Benoit

AI-Assisted Content Analysis

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This book, under contract with Sage, builds on the quallmer R package and on the research programme described under LLM research.

Expert surveys (PPMD)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Party Policy in Modern Democracies (PPMD) dataset contains expert survey scores of the policy positions of political parties in 47 countries. It accompanies the book of the same title, by Kenneth Benoit and Michael Laver (London: Routledge, 2006).

Data are available from the project website.

LLM research

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This research programme uses large language models to analyze political texts. The lead papers are “Using Large Language Models to Analyze Political Texts Through Natural Language Understanding” (American Journal of Political Science, 2026) and “Measuring issue salience for political parties using LLMs” (West European Politics, 2026), with related writing in the LSE Public Policy Review (2024) and Asian Management Insights (2025).

Collaborators: Scott De Marchi, Conor Laver, Michael Laver and Jinshuai Ma.

The work feeds into the quallmer package and the book AI-Assisted Content Analysis.

quallmer

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

quallmer is an R package for qualitative analysis with large language models, developed with Seraphine F. Maerz.

Related: the 2026 POAL methods brief, “Application of LLMs to Qualitative Coding Tasks Using quallmer”.

quanteda

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

quanteda is an R package for the Quantitative Analysis of Textual Data, with companion packages quanteda.textmodels, quanteda.textstats and quanteda.textplots.

readtext is an R package for reading text files in all their various formats.

spacyr is an R wrapper to the spaCy NLP library.