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Abstract

Spain has adopted 386,850 new norms since the beginning of the democratic period (1979-2020) and its rate of adoption has quadrupled since 1978 (12,250 new regulations were published in the year 2020). Notwithstanding, in addition to the problems that may arise from the "quantity” of regulations, the legal framework can also be complex due to “qualitative” reasons such as (1) the linguistic ambiguity of the norms or (2) their relational structure (i.e. references between legal documents). Our article innovates by analysing these new dimensions of complexity at the regional level using text mining and explores their relationship with productivity (as a relevant economic variable) and with judicial efficacy (as a relevant institutional-structural variable).