A Quantitative Portrait of Legislative Change in Ukraine

摘要

Over the past decade, Ukraine has undergone tremendous sociopolitical changes, which continue to this day. While such changes may be analyzed and interpreted from a variety of sources, we utilize recent advancements in the quantitative analysis of culture to identify how these changes are encoded within Ukraine's legislation. Our goal is to provide a new picture of Ukrainian governance that may be used by subject matter experts as a complement to existing forms of political data. To do so, we apply probabilistic topic modeling to compress over a decade of Ukrainian legislation into patterns of word usage. We then apply a recently developed calculation of novelty to measure how different each draft law is from the draft laws which precede it. We find an interesting pattern of legislative changes and identify some of the drivers of these changes. Finally, we discuss the relationship between our results and the broader context of Ukrainian political changes and suggest steps to explore this relationship further.