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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Constructing Policy Narratives in 140 Characters or Less: The Case of Gun Policy Organizations

This study examines interest groups’ framing of gun policy issues via an analysis of nearly 10,000 tweets by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and the National Rifle Association spanning from 2009 to 2014. Utilizing the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF), I investigate the extent to which interest groups use social media to construct policy narratives. This research shows that much can be conveyed in 140 characters; both gun control and gun rights organizations used Twitter to identify victims, blame “villains,” commend “heroes,” and offer policy solutions. This research sheds light on the politics of gun control by revealing trends over time in groups’ framing and suggests refinements for hypotheses of the NPF. Finally, this work underscores the importance of social media for public policy scholarship.     

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.     

Taking perspective of the stories we tell about transgender rights: The narrative policy framework

Our project uses the narrative policy framework (NPF) to explore narrative effects on attitudes about transgender rights. The framework focuses on the stories that are told about public policy. As opposed to conceptualizing communications as informational, NPF suggests that getting lost in the story is primary for attitude change. We also incorporate a perspective taking exercise to examine its effects on individual attitudes. Using an experiment on 1784 American adults, we found that individuals who received the inclusive transgender policy narrative by either watching or reading the narrative held views more supportive of transgender rights, with the effect greater for watching than reading. Those who experienced greater narrative transportation, being more lost in the story, reported more supportive attitudes. We further find that those with traits that lead them to become more imaginatively involved in stories occasionally are more greatly affected by watching policy narratives than those who are less imaginatively involved. However, perspective taking did not influence attitudes and weakened the treatment effects of the narratives. Our findings suggest stories can affect policy attitudes and beliefs, which may be conceptually distinct from traditional framing-based accounts and implies distinctive causal mechanisms that result in attitude change.     

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.     

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.     

How Noninstitutionalized Policy Innovation Is Justified: A Rhetorical Perspective

The premise of this article is that developing persuasive justification is fundamental to the construction and emergence of policy innovation. Nevertheless, given that policy innovation has been typically treated as given, existing public policy research on innovation says little about the process through which the rationales for innovative policies are established. A rhetorical approach is introduced as a new perspective to illustrate this process. In particular, I focus on the case of happiness indices, which is selected because it represents a noninstitutionalized idea which challenges the incumbent way of measuring social progress by GDP-related indicators. Rhetorical analysis is then applied to a body of documents advocating this ambitious innovation, through which I reveal five distinct types of legitimation strategies (i.e., logos, authorization, cosmology, scientization, and teleology). These rhetorical strategies are used in a supplementary manner to describe a policy idea—utopian in many people's eyes—as appropriate and desirable. The concluding discussion section highlights the wider implications of the empirical findings.     

The Intersection of Narrative Policy Analysis and Policy Change Theory

Narrative policy analysis and policy change theory rarely intersect in the literature. This research proposes an integration of these approaches through an empirical analysis of the narrative political strategies of two interest groups involved in policy debate and change over an eight‐year period in the Greater Yellowstone Area. Three research questions are explored: (i) Is it possible to reconcile these seemingly disparate approaches? (ii) Do policy narrative strategies explain how interest groups expand or contain policy issues despite divergent core policy beliefs? (3) How does this new method of analysis add to the literature? One hundred and five documents from the Greater Yellowstone Coalition and the Blue Ribbon Coalition were content analyzed for policy narrative strategies: identification of winners and losers, diffusion or concentration of costs and benefits, and use of condensation symbols, policy surrogates, and science. Five of seven hypotheses were confirmed while controlling for presidential administration and technical expertise. The results indicate that interest groups do use distinctive narrative strategies in the turbulent policy environment.     

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.     

Network Structures within Policy Processes: Coalitions,Power, and Brokerage in Swiss Climate Policy

The Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) is a prominent approach to investigate the formation of coalition and their impact on policy outputs. Although the ACF combines both the network structures of a political process with actors' values and belief systems, most empirical tests focus mainly on beliefs rather than network structures. Considering a relational approach makes particular sense when one wants to investigate the structural patterns of a subsystem and to assess coalition formation and maintenance. The author therefore proceeds by taking two steps to study the existence of coalitions, power relations, and policy preferences: first, social network analysis frames the empirical study of network structures, based on the assumption that common beliefs are reflected in relations among actors involved in policy processes. Second, using a sophisticated mathematical algorithm, the multicriteria analysis furnishes a systematic evaluation of the elite's belief system. This methodological combination constitutes the added value of this research and allows for testing to establish if common beliefs are reflected in network structures.     

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.     

Coalitions, Science, and Belief Change: Comparing Adversarial and Collaborative Policy Subsystems

Arguments for collaborative rather than adversarial approaches to governance rest partly on two axioms: first, that collaborative approaches mitigate conflict to intermediate levels and second, that collaborative approaches help integrate science and values through various joint fact-finding strategies. Using questionnaire data in 1984 and 2001 of policy participants involved in Lake Tahoe water quality policy, this article investigates whether a shift from an adversarial to a collaborative policy subsystem is associated with (i) convergence in beliefs regarding water quality problems and policy proposals; and (ii) an increase in the use of science-based empirical beliefs and a decrease in the use of normative beliefs in supporting policy proposals. The findings send a mixed message to policymakers and researchers about science and collaboration. The analysis suggests that collaborative policy subsystems are associated with convergence in some beliefs between rival coalitions, but it also suggests that policy participants are no more likely to rely on science-based, empirical beliefs in collaborative than in adversarial policy subsystems.     

Unpacking the Neoliberal Approach to Regional Policy: a Close Reading of John Freebairn's ‘Economic Policy for Rural and Regional Australia’

A close reading of a neoliberal intervention in policy debates on ‘the regional economic problem’ is used to throw light on this method. When it is compared to economic geography, the neoliberal approach advances a relatively simplified conception of regional economic and social life that pays little regard to their richness, complexity and grounded realities. Correspondingly, this approach encourages a vision of regional policy that normalises and exonerates the spatially uneven outcomes of market forces. This article argues that policy‐makers’ ends in the field of regional development should be alert to the limitations that arise from the neoliberal tendency to override the evidence of empirical complexity in favour of a more simple narrative.