There is growing scholarly interest in analyzing changes in policies, laws, and regulations. Some concepts depart from the goal of identifying changes in policy substance. Other contributions have concentrated on the structural characteristics of laws and regulations containing these substantive changes. Extracting measures of policy substance from legislative texts is a challenging and time-consuming endeavor as it requires the manual assessment and coding of legal acts. The assessment of the structural characteristics of laws and regulations, by contrast, can be done applying automated natural language processing. An important critical question is, thus, whether we can combine these approaches and simplify the information extraction by inferring changes in the policy substance from the legislative context in which these changes are embedded. Examining more than 100 legal acts in the area of EU environmental and climate policy, we find that the measures capturing policy substance and the structural characteristics of legal acts context are not systematically linked. In other words: changes in the structural features of legal acts cannot be used as an approximation for changes in policy substance. We conclude by sketching out a research agenda when (and when not) to use the different concepts and related measurements.

中文翻译：

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规则作为政策数据？衡量并联系政策实质和立法背景


学术界对分析政策、法律和法规的变化越来越感兴趣。有些概念背离了确定政策实质变化的目标。其他贡献集中于包含这些实质性变化的法律法规的结构特征。从立法文本中提取政策实质措施是一项具有挑战性且耗时的工作，因为它需要对法律行为进行手动评估和编码。相比之下，对法律法规结构特征的评估可以通过自动自然语言处理来完成。因此，一个重要的关键问题是，我们是否可以结合这些方法，并通过从这些变化所嵌入的立法背景中推断出政策实质的变化来简化信息提取。通过考察欧盟环境和气候政策领域的 100 多项法律法案，我们发现捕捉政策实质的措施与法律法案背景的结构特征并没有系统地联系在一起。换句话说：法律行为结构特征的变化不能用来近似政策实质的变化。最后，我们概述了何时（以及何时不）使用不同概念和相关测量的研究议程。