Book Project

Dissertation Book Project

The Logic of Statute Ambiguity: Understanding China’s Legislative Dynamics

In my dissertation-based book project, I explore the political logic of ambiguity in Chinese national statutes. Departing from the prevailing view of the delegation literature that treats the amount of statutory ambiguity as essentially a control problem, this project offers an alternative account by considering bureaucratic struggle over policy. I argue that ambiguity in law allows regime leaders to navigate competing interests of bureaucratic stakeholders. For the regime leaders, ambiguity helps reconcile policy disputes and facilitate compromise, overcoming legislative gridlock. For the competing bureaucracies, ambiguity serves a “second-best” solution as it avoids locking in unfavorable rules and creates bargaining and interpretative space in the post-legislative stage of policy making. I further argue that ambiguity is a double-edged sword. It helps facilitate bill passage and maintain elite loyalty but runs the risk of reinforcing bureaucratic fragmentation and undermining regulatory coherence.

I evaluate these ideas using lawmaking data in China. I combine qualitative study of the Anti-Monopoly Law and statistical analyses of large collections of laws, implementing regulations and rules between 1993 to 2021. Using process-tracing and novel measures of statute ambiguity, I find that bureaucratic division over policy encourages both jurisdictional and substantive ambiguities in final law. I also find that jurisdictional ambiguity in law is associated with delay of administrative regulations and fragmentation of departmental rules.

This project contributes to advancing our knowledge of how elite conflict is managed in an authoritarian legislature and how policy power is shared among regime insiders with divergent preferences. It also reveals the legal source of China’s bureaucratically fragmented system.