Publication: Empirical linguistic analysis on the changing conception of the state in Switzerland
Some jurists find that the state has recently been taking on greater responsibility towards society, while others claim that it is moving away from authoritarianism and towards a citizen-focussed state that guarantees the provision of certain services. Which of these claims is true?
Such programmatic claims frequently form the background of legal analyses; in this case, the topics addressed are emergency law and the general police powers clause on the one hand, and public service and public-private partnerships on the other. These topics are placed in a specific context, within the framework of a changing conception of the state, in order to justify the proposed variations within the legal discourse. Legitimising law through such justifications, however, is questionable when they are merely based on the individual perceptions of a few authors.
Computer-assisted corpus-based text analysis constitutes an empirical method for measuring and evaluating changes in the legal discourse. It allows hypotheses based on qualitative data to be tested and new hypotheses based on quantitative data to be formulated. This publication presents exemplary analyses which examine the claims that the state is currently developing into an entity that focuses primarily on guaranteeing services or, increasingly, on guaranteeing security.
This working paper provides a summary of partial results obtained in a project (No. 138542) funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. These results were presented by Andreas Abegg at the Transius Symposium on Corpus Analysis in Legal Research and Legal Translation Studies in Geneva on 3 June 2016.