CORA: An open-source software tool for Combinational Regularity Analysis

Abstract

Modern Configurational Comparative Methods (CCMs), such as Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) and Coincidence Analysis (CNA), have gained in popularity among social scientists over the last thirty years. A new CCM called Combinational Regularity Analysis (CORA) has recently joined this family of methods. In this article, we provide a software tutorial for the open-source package CORA, which implements the eponymous method. In particular, we demonstrate how to use CORA to discover shared causes of complex effects and how to interpret corresponding solutions correctly, how to mine configurational data to identify minimum-size tuples of solution-generating inputs, and how to visualize solutions by means of logic diagrams.

Keywords: Boolean algebra, Coincidence Analysis (CNA), Combinational Regularity Analysis (CORA), Configurational Comparative Methods (CCMs), Google Colaboratory, Python, Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA)