When Better Codebooks Are Not Enough: Predictive Performance and Behavioral Reliability in LLM Political Event Coding

Data from affected populations are crucial for informing humanitarian response, but their value depends on timely and consistent interpretation of nuanced accounts of need. Humanitarian organizations often lack the staff, time, and specialist expertise required to analyze this information at scale. Large language models (LLMs) may expand this capacity, but their reliability for coding qualitative humanitarian data has not been directly established. This benchmark study compares 46 LLMs to a human Gold Standard using 150 high-fidelity synthetic humanitarian transcripts. Evaluation combined inter-rater reliability testing with Krippendorff's alpha, discrepancy analysis distinguishing correct, near-correct, and incorrect codes, and qualitative assessment across humanitarian-specific criteria including discrimination, complex needs hierarchies, and non-standard communication styles. The authors find that multiple LLMs can perform deductive coding at reliability levels comparable to experienced human coders, especially when structured prompts and reasoning-enabled configurations are used. At the same time, aggregate reliability metrics alone are insufficient for deployment decisions. Models varied in recognizing needs expressed indirectly, needs outside predefined categories, and protection-relevant concerns such as physical safety and discrimination. These findings suggest that LLMs can materially expand humanitarian analytical capacity, but not as substitutes for human judgment. Appropriate use requires structured codebooks, reasoning-enabled models, attention to theme-specific performance, and tiered oversight focused on categories where miscoding would have the greatest programmatic consequences. For sensitive humanitarian data, open-weights models deployed on self-hosted infrastructure may offer a viable path for combining analytical scalability with stronger data governance.

We study what LLMs do when a user applies pressure in an uncomfortable situation: a user insists, begs, flatters or grieves, and the model gives up a correct fact, writes a document it should refuse, or cheers a plan that will cost the user money. We send frozen multi-turn scenes, identical for every model regardless of the reply, to 60 models from 13 vendors, and label each transcript with a codebook built by open coding and then frozen: a trajectory (the model held its position or folded) and a manner (how it held or folded). Two findings separate. Whether a model holds tracks its generation, meaning how recent it is: fold rate correlates with a public capability index at Spearman -0.64, with little vendor effect. How it holds tracks the vendor: six of the 17 manner codes sort by vendor at permutation p <= 0.001, corrected across the codebook. We report four vendor profiles on the codes that cleared reliability. We also ask which parts of the labeling need a person. Six LLM coders from three vendors apply the codebook more consistently than three human coders do (Krippendorff's alpha 0.66 against 0.46), agree with the codebook's author on trajectory at kappa 0.84 to 0.91 on transcripts the codebook's examples never touched, and match an adjudicated human reference at 0.83. Blind machine readings recover the codebook's categories but cannot tell which of them a second reader would apply the same way. We conclude that for behavior a non-specialist can judge, the human contribution is authoring and bounding the codes and owning a small reference, not producing labels at volume.

Qualitative coding is central to social science, but expert annotation is difficult to scale. LLMs offer a possible extension, yet require careful validation when the target construct is interpretive, theoretically loaded, and only indirectly expressed. We study this problem in a difficult case: detecting whether authors treat Bayesian models as descriptions of mental and neural mechanisms (realism) or as useful mathematical tools (instrumentalism). Our method combines a theory-driven codebook, expert-coded reference annotations, a diagnostic-gated prompt-optimization search yielding a shared zero-shot prompt for three frontier LLMs (GPT-5.1, Claude Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 3 Pro Preview), and multi-rater reliability analysis. The final prompt achieved a held-out combined reliability score of 0.76 (harmonic mean of ICC = 0.79 and $α$ = 0.74), with all diagnostics satisfied. Deployed on 6,858 quotes from 210 articles, the three LLMs reached substantial quote-level agreement (ICC = 0.80; $α$ = 0.76; combined = 0.78) and near-perfect article-level rank stability ($r$ = 0.96-0.97 across rater pairs). The corpus was predominantly weakly realist, but article-level stances were rarely uniform: only 1.4% of articles used a single band, while 59.5% spanned four or more. Low-level perception/motor articles scored 8.8 Realism points higher than high-level cognition articles ($p < .001$, $d = 0.60$), quantifying a long-held qualitative intuition. We present this as an expert-led case study; the framework is intended to generalize to similar theoretically demanding tasks, not to all qualitative analysis.