Quantitative analysis

Quantitative analysis of legislation in the Visegrad countries - the project proposal

There is a group in the Institute of State and Law of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, which deals with quantitative description of legal order of the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic on a long term basis. This group has created a representative database of the Czech and Slovak legal order since 1918 (i.e since the creation of the Czechoslovak republic. Databases contain legal regulations, explanatory reports, judicial decisions of the highest courts and the selection of basic textbooks for individual branches – in total 180,000.- of detailed descriptions of these documents and 80,000 full text documents. The database in descriptions and full text documents is complete since 1990. Results of analyses are continuously published.

Within the framework of this long term project we have worked out a special methodology for the description of the main trends of the legal order being examined, which significantly reduces data collection costs an at the same time it can be used quite generally. We carried out comparison of trends in the legislation of the Czech Republic and the Slovak republic on the level of primary and secondary legislation. To put it simply, we can say that a) the main trends in the said countries do not differ to much, b) there is no legislative inflation, i.e. overproduction of the primary and secondary legislation, c) the most crucial problem of both legal orders is overproduction of alterations and amendments, d) it is not possible to prove apparent dependence of trends in legislation on governing political parties, or their coalitions, e) accession of both countries to the European Union is not the main factor explaining overproduction of alterations and amendments and f) the correlation between the results measured at the level of description of documents as a whole and at the level of an internal structure of documents (numbers of words, altered and amended items, number of sections, etc.) is high to such an extent that a rough description of documents.is sufficient for covering the basic trends.

An objective of the project is to check, whether the legislation development trends in the Czech Republic and the Slovak after 1990 (or 1993 - creation of the Slovak Republic) are similar as the legislation development trends in the Polish Republic and the Hungarian Republic. In the first step, the result of the project should be a study published in the journal The Lawyer Quarterly, issued by the Institute of State and Law in the English language, while in the case of a wider scope of the study, it will be issued as a separate publication, also in the English language. Following that we will try to compare results in the Visegrad countries with the standard development of legislation in the EU countries (France, Italy, Germany, Sweden, etc.).

Persons interested in participating in the project should contact: the project director and coordinator dr. F. Novák: e_mail: novak@ilaw.cas.cz