ALIGNED
Assessing Legislative Integration & Governance Norms in European Democracies
ALIGNED is a research tool designed to analyze how reform efforts are narrated in official European Commission reports. It goes sentence by sentence—mapping tone, topic, and direction—to show how reforms are framed rather than whether they occurred.
🧠 Why this matters: Official language shapes political reality. Progress reports are more than updates—they are signals to governments, donors, and citizens. ALIGNED helps you understand how those signals are structured.
What You Can Do
📊 Explore the Dashboard
Compare EC evaluation language across years, chapters, and themes. Visual and intuitive.
📘 Read the Method
Understand the coding rules, variables, and reliability measures behind ALIGNED.
📝 See ALIGNED in Action
Read blog posts using ALIGNED insights to highlight rhetorical patterns in real reports.
How It Works
ALIGNED doesn’t tell you whether reforms happened—it tells you how they were described. It assigns a value to each sentence (-1 to +1), tags the topic, effort type, and domain, and allows you to trace shifts in tone and focus across time.
“Progress is rarely linear—but reporting narratives often are. ALIGNED helps unpack the language behind bureaucratic evaluation.”
Who Built This?
ALIGNED and Reform Track were developed as part of a PhD project by political sociologist Ognjen Karadzic. It builds on prior experience in democratic monitoring, and aims to put academic tools in the hands of practitioners, oversight bodies, and researchers.
The tool reflects official language—not reality. But in EU reform politics, language is power.
🛠️ Beta Notice: The current dashboard uses fake data for demonstration. Available analyses are entirely AI generated for presentation purposes. Full analysis of real data coming October 2025.