Communicating Climate Change: Are Stories Better than “Just the Facts”?

Postpositive policy scholarship has long asserted the importance of narratives—or stories—in shaping public policy through public opinion. In part, the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) was developed to empirically test this assertion. To assess the relationship between policy narratives and public opinion, NPF posits several causal mechanisms including narrative transportation. Narrative transportation is a measure used to assess the extent to which individuals exposed to a story are “transported” into that story. NPF hypothesizes that as narrative transportation increases the reader of the story will (i) have more positive affect for characters within the story; and (ii) will find the story more persuasive. Using an online experiment involving a nationally representative sample of over 1,700 respondents, this research tests narrative transportation hypotheses by exposing subjects to one of three Cultural Theory narratives about climate change, as well as a control list of scientifically agreed upon facts. While findings do not support that narratives are any more transportive than fact lists in terms of directly persuading respondents to accept specific climate change policies, the data do show that narrative transportation positively influences affect for hero characters, which extant research demonstrates indirectly influences the persuasiveness of a story.     

The Narrative Uses of Evidence

When scientific evidence is used in policy controversies, it is always embedded in narrative stories. The Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) is an empirical framework used to study the role of narratives in public policy. While the NPF has considered the relationship between evidence and narratives from different angles, it has not used a consistent approach in examining how evidence is embedded in narratives. This article develops a categorization of narrative uses of evidence. A narrative use of evidence is defined by the different roles that evidence plays in the plot of a narrative depending on which narrative element is addressed by a given piece of evidence. To distinguish different narrative uses of evidence, the article examines how competing coalitions use the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) study in Swiss direct‐democratic campaigns on school policy. Quantitative and qualitative content analyses of newspaper articles and governmental documents show how evidence may relate to all main narrative elements and may play different roles in the plot of a narrative. The findings demonstrate significant differences in the narrative uses of PISA between coalitions related to the story types and narrative strategies that each coalition uses. Finally, the implications for future NPF research are discussed.     

A Narrative Policy Framework: Clear Enough to Be Wrong?

Narratives are increasingly subject to empirical study in a wide variety of disciplines. However, in public policy, narratives are thought of almost exclusively as a poststructural concept outside the realm of empirical study. In this paper, after reviewing the major literature on narratives, we argue that policy narratives can be studied using systematic empirical approaches and introduce a “Narrative Policy Framework” (NPF) for elaboration and empirical testing. The NPF defines narrative structure and narrative content. We then discuss narrative at the micro level of analysis and examine how narratives impact individual attitudes and hence aggregate public opinion. Similarly, we examine strategies for the studying of group and elite behavior using the NPF. We conclude with seven hypotheses for researchers interested in elaborating the framework.     

An Angel on the Wind: How Heroic Policy Narratives Shape Policy Realities

Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) is a new and maturing theory of the policy process that takes a systematic, scientific approach to understanding the social construction of policy realities. As such, NPF serves as a bridge between postpositivists, who assert that public policymaking is contextualized through narratives and social construction, and positivists, who contend that legitimacy is grounded in falsifiable claims. The central questions of NPF are: What is the empirical role of policy narratives in the policy process and do policy narratives influence policy outcomes? First, the contributions of NPF scholarship at three levels of analysis—micro, meso, and macro—are examined. Next, necessary conditions of a policy narrative are specified, accompanied by detailed discussion of the narrative components: narrative elements, narrative strategies, and policy beliefs. Finally, an empirical illustration of NPF—a case study of Cape Wind's proposal to install wind turbines off Nantucket—is presented. Although intercoalitional differences have long been studied in the NPF scholarship, this is the first study to examine intracoalitional cohesion or the extent to which a coalition tells the same story across narrative elements, narrative strategies, and policy beliefs. NPF is a new approach to the study of the policy process that offers empirical pathways to better speculating the role of narrative in the policy process.     

What's the grand story? A macro-narrative analytical model and the case of Swiss child and adult protection policy

This paper expands on the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) by adding a theoretical and empirical exploration into macrolevel narratives. Existing NPF research largely neglects macrolevel narratives, which prevents the NPF from developing its full power. The main contributions of this paper are threefold: (1) It provides a definition of macrolevel narratives by conceptualizing them as the “story form” of a policy paradigm. (2) It proposes a model and an empirical approach, which may lay the foundation for a standard macrolevel NPF approach. (3) It contributes to the NPF's aim of connecting the macro and meso level. The paper tests the model in a comparative multi-method design applied to the Swiss child and adult protection policy. The findings show that macrolevel NPF analysis helps understand where mesolevel policy debates come from, namely from an underlying paradigm and its effects on institutions and culture that enable and constrain macrolevel narratives.     

Narrative policy images: Intersecting narrative & attention in presidential stories about the environment

Drawing on ideas about how narratives focus attention, this paper develops a “narrative policy image” using the Punctuated Equilibrium Theory and Narrative Policy Framework explanations of the policy process. The concept of a narrative policy image is applied to test partisan expectations about presidential environmental policy stories in State of the Union Addresses over 73 years. This research finds that Democratic stories focus on problems like climate change and victims and Republican stories emphasize solutions like new programs and upholding the status quo. These trends point to potential story types and suggest a narrative policy image, including both narrative components and valence, may be a useful concept for understanding narrative attention in macropolitics.     

Analyzing the association of policy narratives with problem tractability in the implementation of EU decisions: Evidence from the phytosanitary policy area

The Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) suggests that narratives can be employed to define and contest policy problems. Yet, few NPF studies have explicitly addressed the narrative portrayal of problem intractability. What role do narratives play in a situation of uncertainty about the causes and solutions of the problem, when strong divergences regarding the values and interests of the policy actors exist? The article anchors the NPF to the literatures on problem definition and implementation to advance two propositions about (a) how differences in the use of narrative elements can be suggestive of the degree of problem (in-)tractability; and (b) whether other elements of tractability, namely the presence of a valid causal theory, are associated with the usage of narrative strategies. I test the propositions by analyzing media commentaries surrounding the implementation of European decisions to tackle a tree-killing epidemic in Italy. The findings suggest that narratives can helpfully illustrate the intractability inherent in the policy debate. However, narratives can also develop independently of factors that the implementation literature understands as conducive to lowering intractability, namely knowledge accumulation. The NPF may represent a promising alternative to understand policy implementation processes.     

The role of policy narrators during crisis: A micro-level analysis of the sourcing,synthesizing, and sharing of policy narratives in rural Texas

How do policymakers respond to crises? The Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) answers this question by focusing on the contest over policy narratives. This paper focuses on the individuals constructing those policy narratives, conceptualizing them as policy narrators. Using a case study approach, we analyze seven counties located in a major oil and gas formation in Texas, which in early 2020 faced both an oil bust and the onset of COVID-19. We explore four sets of propositions about how policy narrators source, synthesize, and share their policy narratives. We find that while their narratives vary, the structure of those narratives is similar; their backgrounds shape how they source narratives, and they tailor their levels of narrative breach to the action (or inaction) they hope for. They avoid casting other local actors as villains, place their audience as the hero, and situate themselves as either supporting or a member of that audience, stressing their common ties. From these findings, we put forward a working definition of policy narrators, identify how they fit into the NPF, and discuss how they relate to other types of policy actors, including policy entrepreneurs.     

Policy dimension: A new concept to distinguish substance from process in the Narrative Policy Framework

This article introduces the distinction between substance (questions of policy design) and process (questions of power in the policy process) to the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF). While both occur in existing NPF research, so far, they are not separated analytically. We conceptualize them as categories of the “policy dimension,” a new aspect of narrative content. Applying this dimension to an exploratory case, we show that such an analysis leads to useful insights for NPF scholars. Substance policy narrative elements show a debate about a policy's implementation model, whereas process policy narrative elements reveal that this debate is permeated by power conflicts. Furthermore, we find that the two categories' occurrence in narratives is influenced by the debate venue, whereas political parties as narrators do not seem to be relevant. The policy dimension allows for new research avenues and provides practitioners with a new tool to understand and intervene in policy debates.     

Narrative strategies in a nondemocratic setting: Moscow’s urban policy debates

The Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) explains the role of narratives in policy processes. The NPF was developed for democratic contexts and has not been systematically applied in a nondemocratic setting. This study fills this gap with an empirical analysis of narrative strategies used by governmental and oppositional actors in urban policy debates in Moscow. Results show how governmental actors consistently use angel shifts, contain issues, and avoid using causal mechanisms, while actors opposing governmental policy use devil shifts, expand issues, and use intentional causal mechanisms. The findings suggest that narrative strategies differ depending on whether policy actors seek to promote policy reforms or draw attention to problems. We argue that policy actors’ objectives are a well-suited predictor for narrative strategies in both democratic and nondemocratic contexts.     

Policy Narratives and Policy Processes

The Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) has influenced a generation of policy scholars with its emphasis on causal drivers, testable hypotheses, and falsification. Until recently, the role of policy narratives has been largely neglected in ACF literature partially because much of that work has operated outside of traditional social science principles, such as falsification. Yet emerging literature under the rubric of Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) demonstrates how the role of policy narratives in policy processes is studied using the same rigorous social science standards initially set forth by Paul A. Sabatier. The NPF identifies theories specifying narrative elements and strategies that are likely useful to ACF researchers as classes of variables that have yet to be integrated. Examining this proposition, we provide seven hypotheses related to critical ACF concepts including advocacy coalitions and policy beliefs, policy learning, public opinion, and strategy. Our goal is to stay within the scientific, theoretical, and methodological tradition of the ACF and show how NPF's empirical, hypotheses, and causal driven work on policy narratives identifies theories applicable to ACF research while also offering an independent framework capable of explaining the policy process through the power of policy narratives. In doing so, we believe both ACF and NPF scholarship can contribute to the advancement of our understanding of the policy process.     

Shifting narrative strategies: How monument advocates change their stories in response to conflict over time

This paper expands the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) by employing an exploratory case study approach to examine the construction of narratives temporally. A large-N Twitter dataset concerning the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante monuments controversy is utilized to examine the question: how does the use of narrative strategies change over time? Through the application of change-point analysis, we determine time points of significant shifts towards use of the devil-angel shift, scope of the conflict, and causal mechanism strategies. Overall, we find that organizations do not vary their use of narrative strategies over the course of a policy conflict but instead demonstrate discrete changes in response to certain policy events. Based on our findings, we conclude with suggestions for refining and expanding NPF hypotheses. Specifically, we recommend a more contextual analysis of shifts in narrative strategy use in response to specific events over time.     

Pursuing Shared Civic Purposes amidst Division and Diversity in Modern America

The severe political polarization that besets contemporary America cannot be successfully diminished unless Americans advance narratives of common identity, stories of peoplehood, in which most can see their aspirations and values expressed. America as an ongoing democratic project is one such narrative. Still better is the story told by the antislavery constitutionalists, including Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, who saw America as dedicated to securing basic rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, for all people, of all colors, everywhere.     

Cultural policy as mythical narrative

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we argue that policy assumptions are shaped by mythical narratives carrying underlying beliefs and values. Drawing on narrative studies, organisational theory and Gramsci’s cultural hegemony theory, we examine how sense-making narratives create consensus, how they imply causation and individual agency, and finally how narratives fragment to reveal alternatives to hegemonic ‘common sense’ assumptions. Applying this framework to cultural policy we examine the place of mythic, sense-making narratives in the historical development of foundational national cultural policies in the UK and Mexico – respectively, narratives of ‘the civilising mission’ and ‘social transformation’. We then consider narrative emplotment and individualisation underpinning assumptions about individual creativity in the UK creative industries policy. Finally, we address the postmodern turn in narrative studies, showing how fragmented, polysemous narratives fracture cultural policy into ‘personalised truths’ and give voice to other, counter-hegemonic perspectives. We conclude by proposing an agenda for narrative research in cultural policy.     

STORY MAKES HISTORY,THEORY MAKES STORY: DEVELOPING RÜSEN'S HISTORIK IN LOGICAL AND SEMIOTIC DIRECTIONS

This essay will argue that the traditional opposition between narrative and theory in historical sciences is dissolved if we conceive of narratives as theoretical devices for understanding events in time through special concepts that abridge typical sequences of events. I shall stress, in the context of the Historical Knowledge Epistemological Square (HKES) that emerged with the scientization of history, that history is always narrative, story has a theoretical ground of itself, and scientific histories address the need for a conceptual progression in ever‐improved narratives. This will lead to identification of three major theoretical levels in historical stories: naming, plotting (or emplotment), and formalizing. We revisit Jörn Rüsen's theory of history as the best starting point, and explore to what extent it could be developed by (i) taking a deeper look into narratological knowledge, and (ii) reanalyzing logically the conceptual strata in order to bridge the overrated Forschung/Darstellung (research/exposition) divide. The corollary: we should consider (scientific) historical writing as the last step of historical research, not as the next step after research is over. This thesis will drive us to a reconsideration of the German Historik regarding the problem of interpretation and exposition. Far from alienating history from science, narrative links history positively to anthropology and biology. The crossing of our triad name‐plot‐model with Rüsen's four theoretical levels (categories‐types‐concepts‐names) points to the feasibility of expanding Rüsen's Historik in logical and semiotic directions. Story makes history, theory makes story, and historical reason may proceed.     

Advocacy Group Messaging on Social Media: Using the Narrative Policy Framework to Study Twitter Messages about Nuclear Energy Policy in the United States

Increasingly, policy scholars are using the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) to systematically study the narrative elements and strategies that policy actors and groups use to advance their agendas. The majority of these studies analyze reports, documents, and websites published by the actors and groups that are most active in the policy subsystem. Though useful, these “public consumption documents” can be difficult to find and relatively static. In this article, we suggest that the constant flow of messages and content that competing actors and groups publish on social media may provide a solution to this problem. To test this proposition, we use the NPF to analyze messages published on Twitter by competing advocacy groups in the U.S. nuclear energy policy subsystem from January 2014 to May 2014 (n = 703). We find that both groups use Twitter to disseminate messages that contain the basic elements of policy narratives. Moreover, the narratives they use include strategies that are consistent with their position in the subsystem. These findings demonstrate the utility of the NPF for research on social media and, more importantly, validate the use of Twitter data in future work on the NPF.     

Responsibility Ethics and Postliberalism: Rereading H. Richard Niebuhr's The Meaning of Revelation

Abstract

Postliberals have hailed H. Richard Niebuhr's The Meaning of Revelation as a harbinger of narrative theology. A careful reading of Niebuhr's argument, however, suggests a theological ethic that is at once attentive to the narrative formation of agency and yet distinct from postliberalism because of its attention to the divine object of Christians' stories. Niebuhr's theocentrism yields a view of narrative as opened from the inside because it requires appropriation of what he calls "external" narratives in order to do justice to the sovereignty of God. The result is a theological ethic which is sharply critical of modern conceptions of agency and yet continually sifted by contemporary insights and experience.     

Emplotment as Epic in Archaeological Writing: The Site Monograph as Narrative

To emplot a narrative as epic is to present a story of vast scope and multiple plots as a legitimate member of a tradition of other such stories. This article argues that emplotment as epic is the broadest of three levels of plot in archaeological writings. At that level, the site monograph emerges as a characteristically archaeological form of narrative, fundamental to archaeology as a discipline and a source of chronic anxiety for archaeologists. The ‘stories’ told in site monographs are epic in length, diversity of materials covered and multiplicity of themes, plots and authors. Indeed, the more complexities of that sort the better, since those are features that help to emplot the work as good archaeology.     

Telling Stories to Hear Autoethnography: Researching women's lives in northern Pakistan

Stories about sewing machines are not usually the stuff of geographies, although stories and narratives offer potential as a geographic method. In this article, I examine the ways that story telling is a reflexive representational strategy, becoming a text for analysis that can be complemented by field research methods. I examine a story about sewing machines to suggest how it can be an analytical tool for postcolonial research, conveying what may be called the ‘real’ effects of colonialism, imperialism, and globalization in the lives of the women I researched in northern Pakistan. This method of representation makes more transparent the extent of women's participation in constructing ‘my’ narrative and research.     

Angels versus Devils: The Portrayal of Characters in the Gun Policy Debate

This research examines the role of the devil shift and angel shift in interest group rhetoric using the case of gun policy. The Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) suggests that the devil shift—whereby political actors characterize their opponents as more malicious and powerful than they actually are—is common in intractable policy debates. Through an analysis of e‐mails and press releases by two gun control organizations and two gun rights organizations, I examine how groups portray themselves and their opponents. I identify two dimensions relevant to these portrayals: (1) whether a character in a policy narrative is portrayed as good or evil, and (2) whether a character is portrayed as strong or weak. The findings indicate that while the devil shift is present, the angel shift—that is, the glorification of one's own coalition—is more common in gun policy groups' communications. Two alternative characterizations, which I call the angel in distress and the devil diminished, are also present. The use of these character portrayals varies significantly across political coalitions and as a function of communication purposes. The results suggest a need to reconceptualize character portrayals to better understand how they operate as narrative strategies in the NPF.