Understanding Statute Ambiguity: Bureaucratic Competition and Lawmaking in China

• In Event: New Perspectives on Policymaking

Abstract

This article explores the political logic of ambiguity in Chinese legislation. Departing from the prevailing view of the delegation literature that treats the amount of statutory ambiguity as essentially a control problem, this study 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 regime leaders, ambiguity helps reconcile policy disputes and facilitate compromise, overcoming legislative gridlock. For competing bureaucracies, ambiguity serves a “second-best” solution as it avoids locking in hostile policies and creates bargaining and interpretative space in the post-legislative stage. 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 a large collection of laws passed by the Chinese National People's Congress between 1993 and 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 laws. This study contributes to advancing our knowledge of how elite disputes are managed in an authoritarian legislature and how policy influence is shared among regime insiders with divergent preferences.

Author

• Jiying Jiang, University of Macau