The Devil Is in the Details: Understanding the Causes of Policy Specificity and Ambiguity

The level of detail in a given law can have dramatic consequences for how that law is interpreted and applied. In The Devil Is in the Details, Rachel VanSickle-Ward focuses on the dynamics of social policy construction in the United States in order to better understand why the wording of legislation can range from the specific to the ambiguous. When policies are high salience, the fissures produced by partisan discord, interest group diversity, and pluralistic executive branches promote ambiguous policy. When policies are lower profile, this relationship is more tenuous and, at times, inverted, with contention producing more policy detail. Put simply, on important and controversial legislation, ambiguity serves as a vehicle for compromise when key participants disagree over details. Moreover, fragmentation is a more powerful driver of ambiguity than limits in technical expertise or legislative capacity. This multi-method investigation is the first to measure statute specificity directly. VanSickle-Ward combines comprehensive content analysis of more than 250 health and welfare bills passed in 44 states in the 1990s and 2000s with in-depth interviews of policy-making elites.