Legal Clarity and the Rule of Law: A Global Experimental Study of Consistency in Administrative Decision‐Making

ABSTRACT Laws often contain linguistically complex features that increase cognitive processing demands and weaken comprehension. We extend this argument to bureaucratic decision‐making by proposing that reduced legal clarity decreases the consistency of administrative decisions. We test this argument using an online survey experiment with nearly 900 current and former government officials from 33 countries, who were randomly assigned to adjudicate a real administrative case under either a less‐clear or clearer legal text. The case, which involves a building permit application, provides a realistic and broadly comparable context for examining how legal clarity shapes consistency in administrative decision‐making. Exposure to reduced legal clarity significantly decreased the consistency in law application and increased the likelihood of legally incorrect decisions. There is no evidence that reduced legal clarity systematically steers decision‐makers toward a single dominant error category.