On the Reform of the Italian Constitution: an Interdisciplinary Text Readability Analysis

This work can be considered as an instant paper: on June 18, 2024 the Constitutional Reform Bill presented by the Italian Government last November and reviewed by the Senate’s Constitutional Affairs Committee on the "premiership" received its first approval by the Italian Senate. We present an analysis aimed at linguistically and computationally characterizing the readability of the text amendments now being discussed. It puts together evidences from different perspectives: legal and linguistic analysis, traditional readability indices, a novel attempt to define readability through the prediction of reading times; all such perspectives are compared with the output obtained by prompting GPT to take into consideration also the output of that language model. The proposed analyses can be intended as a technical contribution to the reflection on issues fundamental to democracy in Italy and beyond, concerning the need to analyze the quality of the writing of such fundamental documents for the democratic life of states.