Powerful Legislature or Rubber Stamper? A Text Reuse Analysis of Hungarian Bills and Laws

The paper applies the text reuse approach to an analysis of the Hungarian legislative process. The ‘viscosity’ of the Hungarian National Assembly, the extent to which it can constrain the government, is investigated by comparing the text of bills introduced in parliament with that of adopted laws between 1994 and 2018. Our corpus contains 3690 pairs of texts while the database is supplemented by more than two dozen explanatory variables which are traditionally used for assessing the structure and extent of legislative power and autonomy. By applying text mining and regression methods, we measure, inter alia, how the origin of laws (whether it is an international treaty, or initiated by the government or committees and MPs), the composition of governing coalitions and polarisation in the party system, or the policy area of the law in question affects the magnitude of deviation from the original text via legislative amendments. Our preliminary results show, on the one hand, that bills are modified less when their purpose is the ratification of international agreements, and more if they had been introduced by committees and MPs and not the government. We also find that different legislative cycles are associated with considerable variations in legislative autonomy. On the other hand, a number of variables related to partisan politics proved to be insignificant.