Efficiency versus inequality: a computational and bibliometric analysis of law and political economy scholarship

This study provides a large-scale empirical comparison between Law & Economics (LE) and Law & Political Economy (LPE) scholarship using computational text analysis techniques. Drawing on 405 publications indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection between 2010 and 2025, the study investigates whether LE and LPE represent conceptually distinct intellectual traditions characterized by different discourse orientations and thematic structures. The research integrates bibliometric analysis, Natural Language Processing (NLP), TF-IDF analysis, topic modeling, econometric modeling, and machine learning classification techniques to evaluate the divergence between the two scholarly frameworks. The findings reveal that LE scholarship remains strongly associated with efficiency-oriented discourse emphasizing markets, incentives, liability systems, and institutional optimization, whereas LPE scholarship demonstrates significantly stronger politically oriented discourse centered on governance, institutional power, social structures, and distributive concerns. Topic modeling results further confirm substantial thematic divergence between the two traditions. The econometric analysis demonstrates that LPE scholarship is significantly associated with higher politically oriented discourse and lower efficiency-oriented discourse. Robustness tests and logistic classification models additionally confirm the stability and computational distinguishability of the two intellectual traditions. Overall, the study contributes new empirical evidence to ongoing debates concerning the evolving relationship between law, economics, governance, and political power within contemporary legal scholarship.