Article in Journal
Semantic Shifts in EU Competition Law: A Data-driven Study of Policy Goals
Anselm Küsters
CESifo, Munich, 2024
EconPol Forum 25 (2), 53-60
CESifo, Munich, 2024
EconPol Forum 25 (2), 53-60
- Text mining and corpus linguistic methods are used to analyze 11,000 EU competition law decisions and judgments
- This reveals a shift in the competition vocabulary from ordoliberalism in the 1970–80s to neoliberalism in the post-2000s
- While the Commission has partly adopted a neoliberal vocabulary, the courts have stuck to ordoliberal rhetoric
- This shift in economic thinking is also reflected in enforcement actions and institutional priorities
- Understanding semantic shifts in EU law is crucial to aligning policy with underlying theories and doctrines