Quality of legislation and compliance: a natural language processing approach

Osnabrügge, Moritz; Vannoni, Matia

Abstract

Several disciplines, such as economics, law, and political science, emphasize the importance of legislative quality, namely well-written legislation. Low-quality legislation cannot be easily implemented because the texts create interpretation problems. To measure the quality of legal texts, we use information from the syntactic and lexical features of their language and apply these measures to a dataset of European Union legislation that contains detailed information on its transposition and decision-making process. We find that syntactic complexity and vagueness are negatively related to member states’ compliance with legislation. The finding on vagueness is robust to controlling for member states’ preferences, administrative resources, length of texts, and discretion. However, the results for syntactic complexity are less robust.

Citation

Osnabrügge, M., & Vannoni, M. (online). Quality of legislation and compliance: a natural language processing approach. Political Science Research and Methods, https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2024.21

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jan 29, 2024
• Online Publication Date: Aug 15, 2024
• Deposit Date: Aug 16, 2024
• Publicly Available Date: Aug 16, 2024
• Journal: Political Science Research and Methods
• Print ISSN: 2049-8470
• Electronic ISSN: 2049-8489
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2024.21
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/2756475