Let me be perfectly unclear: strategic ambiguity in political communication

While clarity is often upheld as a core element of successful communication, we argue that a lack of clarity can also benefit a speaker, a concept called strategic ambiguity. This concept has been used across disciplines for decades, but its definitions are often overly context-specific. In this article, we follow Chaffee's (1991) framework for explication to survey the literature and provide a unified definition of strategic ambiguity as a rhetorical tactic in which a communicator creates a: (1) polysemic message with multiple reasonable interpretations supported by the text, that is: (2) aimed at audiences from varying interpretive communities; and (3) by which polysemy the communicator stands to gain some specific advantage. We offer methodological suggestions on the study of strategic ambiguity, accompanied by two case studies of strategic ambiguity, centering Congressional newsletters and conservative political satire. We close with suggestions for scholarships that could be informed by incorporating strategic ambiguity.