ABSTRACT

One dominant aspect of social phenomena susceptible to social scientific analysis includes what have broadly been described as ‘events’. Events in the social world include large occurrences, or ‘macro’ events, such as elections, military coups, transitions to democracy, social revolutions, international and civil wars, foreign interventions and invasions, social protests and labour strikes, government crackdowns (i.e. the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre or the Myanmar (Burma) military response to the 2007 ‘Saffron’ revolution), and significant market crashes (e.g. the 1929 market crash, the 1982 ‘debt crisis’, or the 1997 Asian financial crisis). They also include small or ‘micro’ events, such as village skirmishes and raids, personal and organized crimes, public lynching, looting, sexual violence, bribery and other corrupt acts, denial of access to services, consumer and commercial firm choices, among countless others. There is a long tradition in the social sciences in the analysis of such events that has included qualitative comparative history of macro events (e.g. Wolf 1969; Womack 1969; Skocpol 1979; Wickham-Crowley 1993) and quantitative comparative analysis of macro events (e.g. Small and Singer 1983; Cioffi-Revilla 1990, 1991, 1996; Cioffi-Revilla and Lai 1995; CioffiRevilla and Landman 1999). The behavioural revolution in the social sciences led to the development of increasingly sophisticated ways to capture, measure and analyse macro and micro events using quantitative analysis. Such data have been collected on cross-national samples of countries that extend across the entire globe and stretch far back into history, including patterns of war in ancient China (Cioffi-Revilla and Lai 1995) and the rise and fall of Mayan city states (Cioffi-Revilla and Landman 1999; also Diamond 2005). Outside the academic world, events-based data have become increasingly important in significant strategic and foreign policy debates on warfare and conflict, such as the debate surrounding the number of civilian deaths as a result of the 2003 invasion of Iraq (see Burnham et al. 2006; www.iraqbodycount.org; Johnson et al. 2008) and the estimations and analysis of political violence in Colombia, in particular during the process of demobilization (Ball et al. 2008; Giles 2008).