Situating legal consciousness and legal compliance: how Dutch welfare clients think and act in relation to the law

Abstract How does legal consciousness matter for compliance? Thus far, this issue has been addressed by two bodies of literature that each focus on one side of the equation but do not speak to each other. Legal consciousness studies analyse how people understand the law but focus less on their compliance with the law. Conversely, most legitimacy studies focus on people's compliance with the law but do not analyse their perceptions of the law. This article draws on the findings from an online survey among Dutch welfare clients to empirically bridge both literatures. I look not only at clients’ own (first‐order) legal consciousness, but also at their second‐order legal consciousness: clients’ assessment of welfare officials’ beliefs about the law. I argue that the connection between legal consciousness and legal compliance is not a unitary phenomenon, but must be situated in relation to particular laws and social hierarchies.