Measuring the Rule of Law Across Legal Traditions
In this article, Jarosław Kantorowicz and Bastián González-Bustamante analyse how the meaning of the rule of law varies across countries and legal traditions, arguing that these differences, despite making it contested, can be systematically measured through computational analysis of parliamentary discourse.
- Author
- Bastián González-Bustamante and Jarosław Kantorowicz
- Date
- 18 June 2026
- Links
- Read the full article here
This article examines the multifaceted nature of the rule of law and develops a method to measure how its meaning varies across countries and legal traditions using parliamentary debates. It distinguishes between procedural (thin) and substantive (thick) dimensions, including legal rules, judicial independence, and rights, and applies word-embedding techniques to capture how these dimensions relate to the concept across jurisdictions.
The findings show a general convergence in the understanding of the rule of law across common law, German, French, and post-socialist traditions. The authors use similarity scores to derive weights for rule-of-law indicators, enabling a sensitivity analysis of existing rankings such as those of the World Justice Project.
While legal traditions still matter, the results suggest increasing convergence, with alternative weighting schemes leading only to minor changes in country rankings.