How Language Works in Politics: The Impact of Vague Legislation on Policy

How Language Works in Politics is rooted in a massive research project: Matt Williams has used machine reading to study every single section of legislation enacted in the United Kingdom between 1900 and 2015. The resulting trove of data allows Williams to explore the effects of vague legislation on powers, duties, and rights in the making of policy around immigration, homelessness, and anti-discrimination. The book assesses the ways that Parliament has attempted to clarify its intent with law on human rights, freedom of information, and equality, and argues that changes to legislative language over the years, especially the increasing use of vague semantic and pragmatic parts of speech, have led to increasingly vague and ineffective legislation.