Abstract
The present paper assesses the performances of two popular text-scaling methods for the analysis of judicial opinions using a well-documented body of case-law: the 16 opinions rendered by the German Federal Constitutional Court on European integration. Unsupervised text-scaling (Wordfish) turns out to generate reliable results, especially for the first 14 opinions. Judicial position estimates on what is interpreted as a pro/anti-integration dimension are broadly in line with standard doctrinal accounts in EU law textbooks and law review articles. Meanwhile, results from supervised text-scaling (Wordscores) prove to be highly sensitive to the choice of reference texts. These findings, it is argued, demonstrate that the basic assumption underpinning the application of text-scaling techniques to party manifestos and legislative speeches -- that word choice is driven by rhetorical considerations -- is generalizable to the specialised form of political communication embodied in judicial opinions.
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