Frost C  omparative Migration Studies (2024) 12:23 from 2016 to 23.6 Third, Jordanian legislation—including constitutional provisions, laws, bylaws, regulations, and executive decisions—located using online legal databases, including Qistas, and ministry websites. Overall, this analysis aims to conceptualize intentional ambiguity as a type of lawregulation implementation gap in citizenship and migration policy. It leverages extensive primary-source data to demonstrate that such implementation gaps can exist and be studied in non-Western, more autocratic, and less-developed contexts, like Jordan. It also reveals that intentional ambiguity can both expand and contract a group’s rights relative to the law, while drawing attention to the agency of executive leaders in shaping implementation gaps. Conceptualizing law‑regulation implementation gaps This paper proposes an approach to identifying law-regulation implementation gaps by focusing on the content of laws, on the one hand, and the content of related implementing measures, on the other. The term “law” here refers to the constitutional articles and provisions in domestic laws and permanent bylaws a state has adopted that outline a group’s legal access to a right. Law does not include the provisions of international conventions to which a state is party, but it does include bilateral and multi-lateral agreements that the state makes with another country (or countries) or international organization(s).7 Laws often are publicly accessible and passed by a parliament with approval from executive leaders. The key traits of laws, as I use the term, are that they legally supersede, are more public than, and are more difficult to change than most legal rules governing implementation. The term “implementation” refers to the legal rules that translate a law into practice, including regulations, decisions, decrees, and instructions.8 Theoretically, this subsidiary legislation follows from and clarifies the law, and it is not necessarily publicly available nor does it typically require parliamentary approval. However, officials can post implementing instructions on government websites or state legal databases. Implementation here is part of Luuk van der Baaren’s (2024, 7–8) “interpretation” of the law because it represents the documents that establish the rules that put primary legislation into effect. Implementation differs from the “application” of the law, which concerns whether bureaucrats apply the primary and subsidiary legislation in practice (van der Baaren, 2024, 8). Overall, implementation measures tend to be more flexible and easier to change than laws. The main traits of implementation measures here are that they are legally subservient to, less public than, and easier to change than laws. Table 1 offers a breakdown of the sources of information used to define and code a law versus implementation. 6 I accessed these interviewees through snowball sampling. I conducted all interviews, the majority of which were in English. For 44% of the 52 interviews I conducted in Arabic, I brought an interpreter to confirm that I understood interviewee dialects. All cited interviews took place in Jordan’s capital, Amman, and interviewees selected the interview location (e.g., offices, homes, cafes, etc.). All interviewees remain anonymous. The author’s institutional review boards approved this research. 7 I include as domestic law a state’s negotiated agreements with other countries and international organizations because of the direct role of state officials in stipulating the terms of those agreements, unlike international conventions. 8 I use the terms implementation, regulations, orders, and subsidiary legislation interchangeably in this paper. Page 4 of 18