Consider that an explanatory note - text reuse analysis of legislative data

In this paper, we examine the explanatory notes of the draft laws as a key element of quality legislation. According to the provisions of the act on legislation, explanatory notes shall describe the social, economic, professional reasons and aims underpinning the need to regulate, as well as to present the expected effects of legal regulation. Even though nowadays, draft laws introduced to the National Assembly contain the mandatory statement of reasons to be attached to the legislature, in practice—instead of professional-legal content—explanatory notes often merely repeat the text of the draft law or represent a rewritten copy of the legislative text with a few words replaced. As a result, explanatory notes often become formal and meaningless and do not fulfil their purpose. We assume that those sections of the statement of reasons that merely copy the legislation's text or replace a few words do not add any value or explain the proposed regulation. We have compiled a complex database of almost 3,500 pairs of documents, containing the texts of laws adopted between 1990 and 2022 and their explanatory notes; using this database, we conducted a text analysis. We have found that the text of the explanatory notes has been constantly shortened between 1990 and 2022 compared to the text of the legislation. We then used text reuse analysis to measure the estimated extent to which the explanatory notes were copied from the draft law. This paper presents the empirical results and findings of this pilot research.