(2024) 12:23 Frost Comparative Migration Studies https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-024-00375-2 Comparative Migration Studies Open Access ORIGINAL ARTICLE Ambiguous citizenship policies: Examining implementation gaps across levels of legislation in Jordan Lillian Frost1*    *Correspondence: lfrost@vt.edu Abstract Despite the prevalence of ambiguous citizenship policies that say one thing in law and another in implementing regulations, few studies have focused on systematically studying this type of implementation gap, particularly in contexts beyond North America and Europe. This largely has remained the case despite research on discursive policy gaps, which occur between a policy’s stated objectives and its laws, efficacy gaps, which describe when a policy’s outcomes fail to meet its goals, and compliance gaps, which reflect disparities between a state’s commitments to international law and its corresponding domestic policies. How can we advance conceptualizations of law-regulation implementation gaps? This paper proposes one approach by focusing on the content of domestic laws, on the one hand, and the content of related implementing regulations, on the other. When law-regulation discrepancies occur, they illustrate the agency of senior officials in writing this intentional ambiguity into different levels of legislation, challenging assumptions about institutional weakness and lowerlevel bureaucratic discretion as chief drivers of implementation gaps. The paper illustrates this concept by analyzing discrepancies between Jordan’s nationality and passports laws and their related implementing regulations, particularly regarding Gaza refugees’ access to passports, investors’ access to nationality, and Palestinian-Jordanians’ subjection to nationality withdrawals. These diverse cases of intentional ambiguity demonstrate that such gaps can serve to partially exclude or include a group and can occur with noncitizen and citizen as well as more or less vulnerable groups. 1 Political Science, Virginia Tech, 531 Major Williams Hall (0130), 220 Stanger Street, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA Introduction Sitting in a crowded office, a Jordanian journalist glanced over stacks of papers as he explained a prominent legal concern in Jordan: “the regulations depend on ministers… You do not need parliament to release new regulations…How can people defend themselves because it is regulations (‫ )تعليمات‬not a law (‫”?)قانون‬1 Government officials also are aware of this discrepancy between laws and implementing regulations. As a former minister explained: “The regulations, (‫)التعليمات‬,2 have become more important than the law 1 Author interview with a Jordanian journalist (MD49), February 2017. Hereafter, I simply cite the anonymized individual and interview timing. The author conducted all interviews. 2 I include terms in Arabic when they clarify the concept for an Arabic speaker. © The Author(s) 2024. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://​ creat​iveco​mmons.​org/​licen​ses/​by/4.​0/.