This study aims to examine whether the harmonization of Turkish Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) legislation with European Union (EU) directives reflects not only formal legal alignment but also conceptual alignment in terms of regulatory orientation and worker protection. The research evaluates whether legislative language reveals differences between compliance-oriented and worker-centered safety approaches, with a specific focus on construction-related regulations.
A quantitative text mining approach was applied to compare six pairs of Turkish and EU legislative texts. Lexical similarity was measured using the Levenshtein distance algorithm, and statistical equivalence was assessed using the Wilcoxon-signed rank test. Word frequency and similarity analyses were used to identify dominant regulatory concepts and compare legislative structures.
The results show that three legislative pairs are lexically equivalent, while three differ significantly. Turkish legislation places greater emphasis on obligation-, control- and process-related terminology, whereas EU directives emphasize employee- and protection-oriented concepts. These findings indicate that formal harmonization does not always result in conceptual alignment in regulatory orientation.
The study focuses on lexical patterns and does not directly assess legislative implementation or safety outcomes. However, it demonstrates the value of quantitative text analysis in identifying regulatory orientation and contributes to theoretical understanding of legislative alignment.
This study introduces a reproducible quantitative method for legislative comparison and provides new evidence on differences in regulatory philosophy between Turkish and EU OHS legislation, contributing to construction safety and regulatory research.
