Is Goal-based Regulation Less Clear Than Rules of Conduct? Introducing Novel Measures of Substantive Rule Clarity

Goal-based regulation is advocated as a way to increase regulatee discretion. However, it is also assumed to come at the expense of clarity, since regulatees may have less guidance on which precise behaviour is required. This article examines whether this concern is justified. It operationalises textual precision through the prevalence of vague and indefinite terms, and develops an LLM-assisted method to identify those. The method is applied to 601 provisions from Flemish welfare and environmental regulation. The results reveal that, at the level of regulatory strings, goal-based and rule-based regulation do not differ significantly in terms of textual precision. At the provision level, however, goal-based provisions contain more indefinite terms than rule-based provisions. These findings suggest that textual precision is more closely related to the content of individual provisions than to the general regulatory rationale. They also caution against treating goal-based regulation as a technique that strictly trades clarity for regulatee discretion.