The Politics of Ambiguity: Consistency and Disparity Across the Subfield Divide

Session Submission Type: Virtual Roundtable

Session Description

Much of day-to-day politics is characterized by principal-agent relations, in which delegation is a key feature. In domestic settings, judges, policymakers, and other authorities delegate important tasks to advisors, committees, and bureaucracies. High courts set precedent for lower courts. Even in international relations, where dynamics are typically anarchical, states delegate to their successors by signing international law and other cooperative agreements. Delegation can be thought of as a kind of information transmission: the principal sends political instructions to the agent about how the agent should behave and what tasks she should carry out on the principal’s behalf. For this to happen, signals must be clear.

But political instructions are communicated through language, and language is inherently imprecise. As focal points, legal and policy rules fundamentally provide a benchmark that both principals and agents can use to assess whether the agent’s course of action is compliant with the principal’s instructions. Without clarity, traditional methods of monitoring and enforcement lose their utility, since compliance becomes harder to distinguish from noncompliance. This dynamic is common to all political contexts -- administrative, international, judicial, legislative, or other-wise, but there is substantial variation in the precision of instructions. What happens when policy instructions contain latent ambiguity?

Research programs in each subfield of the discipline have questioned why judges ever issue vague rulings; why Congressional legislation is of purposely varying length and specificity; why statehouses sometimes pass bills that are intricately detailed and at other times ambiguously-worded; why the executive would ever give intentionally confusing orders to the bureaucracy tasked with carrying out its will; and how the interpreters of international agreements sometimes use rhetoric to “evade” their obligations. Ambiguity can muddle instructions, leading to agent discretion and defection, suboptimal policy outcomes, protracted contestation over shared meaning, and other unintended consequences. Incentive-compatible solutions, however, are less obvious.

While we have learned much about the causes and consequences of ambiguity in the past several decades, there remains considerable confusion about definitions and premises. Measurement remains an enduring problem. Scholars of policy language should be especially attentive to their own word choices. Do the various words employed in the literature — detail, vagueness, specificity, ambiguity, precision, clarity, and so on — all speak to the same phenomenon? How would we know? More importantly, these lines of research have developed largely in isolation from one another – with legislative, judicial, and finally international research emerging separately. How can we know whether ambiguity works similarly across settings when key parameters like hierarchy, verification, enforcement, time horizon, political relationships, and political stakes also vary?

Convening junior and senior scholars from Public Law, American Politics, International Relations, and Comparative Politics, this roundtable traces thematic, methodological, and empirical commonalities across subfields: Rachel VanSickle-Ward on the politics of statutory wording, with special emphasis on gender and health politics; Zoltán Búzás on racial and ethnic questions in international human rights; Pamela McCann and Jieun Kim on intragovernmental instructions in the US and China, respectively; Lauren Konken on trade agreements; Jeff Staton on public law and courts; Joseph Smith on administrative law; and Justin Canfil on arms control and international security institutions. Our discussion aims to transcend any one particular paradigm or subfield, instead looking at the state of the field across the discipline. It will aim to synthesize new insights for the direction of future empirical research on a topic of widespread but underappreciated applicability to all political scientists -- the role of ambiguity in politics.

Sub Unit

• Division 26: Law and Courts

Chair

• Rachel VanSickle-Ward Pitzer College

Discussant

• Jeffrey Staton Emory University

Presenters

• Justin K. Canfil Columbia University

• Zoltan I. Buzas University of Notre Dame

• Pamela Clouser McCann University of Southern California

• Jieun Kim University of Pennsylvania

• Joseph L. Smith University of Alabama