Behind the Veil of Vagueness: Success and Failure in Institutional Reforms

Abstract

The difficulties of implementing large institutional reforms are legendary. Reform programs may face strong resistance from designated losers, falter at successive veto points, or stall when multiple decision makers have diverse goals. Institutional theories have successfully accounted for failure of reform in many settings, but scholars have paid less attention to how the strategic design of a reform process can have a positive effect on reform initiatives. We seek to fill this gap by studying the impact of planned ambiguity in reform processes. We hypothesize that reform proposals are more likely to succeed when policy entrepreneurs strategically hide the cost-benefit profile of a reform proposal behind a veil of vagueness until the final stages of the process. Designated losers with limited information about the impact of proposed reforms are less likely to succeed in thwarting the reform. We test the theory on four institutional reforms or reform attempts in Denmark.