In political science, the analysis of political documents is crucial as it helps assessing a wide range of hypotheses related to the priorities set before political actors and institutions. The most widely used and most efficient of the too many methods of assessing political documents are those carried out manually, though. And yet, automatic encoding bears fundamental advantages as well. This paper sets out to compare and contrast the results of two distinct methods applied on the same corpus of texts: one method uses manual encoding content of political documents whereas the other relies on computer-based data encoding. Electoral manifestoes of Belgian main political parties between 1987 and 2007 constitute the basis of the study. Identifying and comparing the major thematics dealt with in the corpus enable us to point out a range of differences and similarities. The paper discusses both methods of encoding so as a set of conclusions is drawn and available for future analyses of political texts.