Replication Data for: Quality of Legislation and Compliance: A Natural Language Processing Approach

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, discretion and the length
of texts. However, the results for syntactic complexity are less robust.