The Transparency of Constitutional Reasoning: A Text Mining Analysis of the Hungarian Constitutional Court’s Jurisprudence

Abstract

The analysis of constitutional interpretation has received much attention in recent years. This article is a contribution to research using text mining methods to account for markers of constitutional reasoning in big data-sized text corpora. We examine how often the Hungarian Constitutional Court (the HCC) reflected on the various methods of interpretation. For this purpose, we have created a complex corpus covering all HCC decisions and orders between 1990 and 2021. We found evidence that the methodological practice of the HCC is not self-reflexive in general as only 44% of its decisions make a reference to at least one method of interpretation. We also show that the self-reflexive nature is even more prevalent (in fact, ubiquitous) in 100 doctrinally important decisions from the 30 years of jurisprudence in question. While this study is a first step towards the quantitative analysis of the reasoning of the constitutional judiciary, further mixed methods research is needed to account for intertemporal changes in such data and to refine the measurement of constitutional interpretation.