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Department of Political Science

A Quantitative Textual Approach of the European Consensus Method of Interpretation in the European Court of Human Rights

How can we develop new methods for detecting European consensus to answer complex and controversial moral and political questions related to European human rights?

The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has the final say on human rights protection in Europe. The Court has developed an interpretative method, the European Consensus (EuC), which it uses to rule on morally, politically or socially sensitive issues. With this method, the Court assesses whether the common practice of European states, international actors and other authorities leads to the emergence of new human rights standards. EuC allows the ECtHR to develop standards in socially sensitive areas such as the protection of religious dress and social minorities. Despite its importance, there is little clarity in legal scholarship on the meaning and function of EuC.

  • What is EuC?
  • How does consensus work within the EuC system?
  • How can an appropriate measurement tool for EuC be defined?

We take a multidisciplinary approach to defining EuC and measuring its use in ECtHR jurisprudence. By applying computational text analysis techniques often used in quantitative political science, we will construct and validate new measures of EuC. We combine expert coding of legal texts done by human rights lawyers with computational approaches from social science developed for textual data. Our new measures will allow the team to determine both the nature and the degree of consensus in each judgment and to identify the linguistic elements that indicate consensus analysis in the first place.

Having constructed these new measures, we will use them to explore important questions in the literature, such as whether the ECtHR is more likely to find consensus when human rights norms emerge in a particular group of countries, compared to another group; whether certain countries are more likely to reject an emerging consensus as identified by the Court - whose views are reflected in the consensus judgments; and finally, how consensus operates within the ECtHR system.