IG Parser: A Software Package for the Encoding of Institutional Statements using the Institutional Grammar
Christopher K. Frantz
TL;DR
The paper presents IG Parser, a modular software system that operationalizes Institutional Grammar 2.0 through the IG Script notation, enabling rigorous, traceable encoding of institutional statements and flexible downstream analysis. It details a three-module architecture (Input, Core Parser, Output) supporting both manual UI and API usage, and producing tabular and visual outputs that preserve structural and semantic essence. Key contributions include a notation-parser pair that maintains an intermediate, output-agnostic representation, supports multi-level expressiveness (IG Core, Extended, Logico), and facilitates inter-coder reliability and large-scale analyses with semantic annotations. The work has practical impact for policy analysis, education, and cross-domain institutional studies, and points to future extensions such as corpus management, domain-specific outputs, and integration with NLP pipelines and large-language models for scalable encoding.
Abstract
This article provides an overview of IG Parser, a software that facilitates qualitative content analysis of formal (e.g., legal) rules or informal (e.g., social) norms, and strategies (such as conventions) -- referred to as institutions -- that govern social systems and operate configurally to describe institutional systems. To this end, the IG Parser employs a distinctive syntax that ensures rigorous encoding of natural language, while automating the transformation into various formats that support the downstream analysis using diverse analytical techniques. The conceptual core of the IG Parser is an associated syntax, IG Script, that operationalizes the conceptual foundations of the Institutional Grammar, and more specifically the Institutional Grammar 2.0, an analytical paradigm for institutional analysis. This article presents the IG Parser, including its conceptual foundations, the syntax specification of IG Script, and its architectural principles. This overview is augmented with selective illustrative examples that highlight its use and the associated benefits.