Quality of legislation and compliance: a natural language processing approach

Moritz Osnabrugge; Matia Vannoni

doi:10.1017/psrm.2024.21

Quality of legislation and compliance: a natural language processing approach

Moritz Osnabrugge^*, Matia Vannoni

^*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)

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.

Original language	English
Journal	Political Science Research and Methods
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2024.21
Publication status	E-pub ahead of print - 15 Aug 2024

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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{\textquoteright} compliance with legislation. The finding on vagueness is robust to controlling for member states{\textquoteright} preferences, administrative resources, length of texts, and discretion. However, the results for syntactic complexity are less robust.",

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AB - 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.

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Quality of legislation and compliance: a natural language processing approach

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