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Semantic Shifts in EU Competition Law: A Data-driven Study of Policy Goals

Anselm Küsters
CESifo, Munich, 2024

EconPol Forum 25 (2), 53-60
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  • 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

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