Talking about the [same] revolution? A comparative analysis of main datasets of revolutionary events

We conduct a comparative analysis of the main datasets on revolutionary events, including The Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes (NAVCO, versions 1.3 and 2.1), Cross-National Time-Series (CNTS), Revolutionary Episodes Dataset by Mark Beissinger, Revolutionary Database by HSE University (CSRA), and Historical Regime Data (HRD). To compare these sources systematically, we develop several complementary empirical instruments designed to identify and interpret differences across datasets. We show that these differences usually concern event boundaries and the inclusion of borderline cases rather than the substantive results of cross-national quantitative analyses, even though the datasets are not fully equivalent and rely on somewhat different operationalizations, definitions, and coding procedures. Across the major sources, we recover similar temporal and spatial distributions of events, as well as broadly similar structural predictors. We therefore argue that these datasets are empirically highly convergent for many comparative purposes, while not being conceptually identical.