Replication For: Measuring legislative stability - A new approach with data from Hungary

While the stability of legislation is one of the fundamental issues in political theory, comparative and quantitative analysis of the subject is in short supply in the political science literature. In this article we propose a novel measurement scheme for legislative stability, and develop a Legislative Stability Index (LSI) to this end. Our index empirically relies on the number and breadth of adopted legislative amendments within the same electoral cycle. The weighted LSIIt is based on a system of categories concerning the frequency with which laws are amended after their adoption. Our approach makes use of a new law-amendment edge-type network for a new Hungarian legislative database. Amendment-type connections are discovered by an automated dictionary-based text mining method. We tested the applicability of our index in various regression models. Results show that the legislative term of government, the length of the law and the way of adoption was were the most significant variables in explaining variation in the stability of legislation.