Frost Comparative Migration Studies (2024) 12:23 Page 5 of 18 Table 1 A policy’s law and implementation components Law Implementation • Articles in the constitution • Provisions in laws and ­bylawsa • Terms of bilateral or multilateral agreements • Regulations, decrees, decisions, instructions • Court records of implementation ­measuresb • Descriptions of implementation ­measuresc a Bylaws can be law when there is no law above them governing that policy area, such as Jordan’s civil service b The records of court cases where individuals sue a government actor can include details about the regulations that the actor claimed to follow when executing the disputed action c Officials can describe the implementation legislation that they issued or were following; individuals can report what officials said about the regulations that supported the official’s actions toward them With these definitions in mind, the term policy has a narrow meaning here. A policy refers to the provisions of a law regarding a particular right and the regulations issued to implement that right. This definition does not focus on discourses about what the policy is or on the daily practices of bureaucrats in following regulations. In addition, I do not use policy to reference the broad reception of a group in a state or to the aggregated myriad of rights a group has. Instead, it focuses on the two legal outputs that state officials produce to stipulate a specific right and that we often assume match (Brunsson, 2019). Intentional ambiguity as a law‑regulation gap This paper focuses on intentional ambiguity as a key law-regulation gap. With intentional ambiguity, executive leaders (e.g., presidents, prime ministers, ministers, top executive advisors, etc.) knowingly allow the provisions in the law governing a right to diverge from those in the implementation orders governing that right. Leaders can do so because they draft, or oversee and approve the drafting, of at least the policy’s subsidiary legislation. That policymakers are aware of and allow or enable this divergence reflects the intentional part of the term. In addition, with intentional ambiguity, the right offered in law is not necessarily unclear, nor is the right offered in implementation, but what is unclear is whether the law or implementation specifies that right. This uncertainty about what a group’s right is reflects the ambiguity part of this term. The focus on laws versus regulations accentuates the agency of executive policymakers in deciding whether to issue implementing measures that complement laws. This is especially the case in more authoritarian states and in certain policy areas, such as citizenship and migration (Hammar, 1985), where executive leaders often essentially draft laws as well as implementing legislation. High-level officials’ involvement differentiates intentional ambiguity from other implementation gaps that stem from limited resources, lack of capacity, or low-level bureaucratic noncompliance (Czaika & de Haas, 2013). When looking at a policy’s law and implementation components, there are four different types of intentionally ambiguous policies.9 These are based on whether state officials create this divergence by: (1) introducing a new law and new regulations (signaling), (2) only issuing new regulations that contrast with an existing law (hidden), (3) only adopting a new law that contrasts with existing regulations (performative), or (4) deciding not to change a preexisting disconnect between a law and its regulations (persistent). These 9 Intentional ambiguity would be a type of “interpretation” implementation gap in van der Baaren’s (2024) typology.