King's College London

In a detailed analysis of legislation drafted by the European Union, researchers found compliance from nation states dropped by almost half for pieces of legislation ranked as the vaguest and most complex.

Problems with interpretation and incomplete transposition all arose when legislation was found to be low quality, which much higher levels of compliance from nations when the text was well-written.

The findings were revealed in a new study, Quality of legislation and compliance: a natural language processing approach, co-authored by Dr Matia Vannoni (King’s College London) and Dr Moritz Osnabrugge (Durham University).

The researchers said: “Our analysis reveals that the quality of legislation, measured as syntactic complexity and vagueness, is positively related to compliance with EU directives. The results for the former are not robust to controlling for the length of legislative texts since longer texts tend to be syntactically more complex. “

Data for the study was drawn from 299 compliance cases related to 21 EU legislative acts (directives) adopted between 1999 and 2003, when the EU had 15 members. The quality of the legislation was measured using natural language processing (NLP) methods that focussed on syntactic complexity and vagueness.

In their results, the researchers found that the least vague pieces of legislation were complied with by 80 per cent of the EU members states, while the compliance rate dropped to just 45 per cent for the pieces of legislation ranked the vaguest.

The study, published in the journal Political Science and Research Methods, can be read in full here: Quality of legislation and compliance: a natural language processing approach.