Narrative Politics in Public Policy

Legalizing Cannabis

Hugh T. Miller

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030453190
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030453206
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book draws on examples from cannabis policy discourse and elsewhere to illustrate how individuals come to subscribe to a particular policy narrative; how policy narratives evolve; how narratives are employed in public policy discourse to compete with other narratives; and how, on implementation, the winning narrative is performed and subsequently institutionalized. Further, it explores how uncertainty and ambiguity are constants in public policy discourse, and how different factions and groups pursue different goals and aspirations. In the current climate of political reality, disputable facts and contestable goals, this book shows how different coalitions and ideologies use narratives to compete for policy dominance. 

© The Author(s) 2020

H. T. MillerNarrative Politics in Public Policyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45320-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Dubiety

Hugh T. Miller¹

(1)

School of Public Administration, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, USA

Hugh T. Miller

Email: [email protected]

Abstract

The human condition is marked by multiple sources of ambiguity and uncertainty. A typical reaction to the resultant anxiety is to impose order through the use of narratives. However, different narratives order things differently. In public policy discourse, different narratives betray not only different goals and aspirations, but also cite different facts and interpret the same facts differently. Hence the job of narrative inquiry is to parse the competing narratives to understand the substantive contest over aspirations and facts.

Keywords

Public policy discourseAmbiguityUncertaintyFactsGoals

End Abstract

In this book I explicate a Narrative Politics model of public policy discourse. This model is designed to emphasize the political nature of narrative competition for dominance in a public policy discourse. Narratives are generated by humans trying to impose order on an uncertain and ambiguous world. The constitutive features of a narrative include the connotative ideograph and a story line that gathers symbolic material into a more or less coherent policy message. The Narrative Politics model aims to understand the political dynamics of policy discourse by paying close attention to the contestable narratives within a bounded policy domain.

Narratives are not self-evident, easily visible objects available for all to effortlessly ascertain. They require an interpreter of sorts, an extradiegetic curator who can sort through and interpret the meaning and substance of multiple narratives—despite the impossibility of getting it right in any permanent sense. Claisse and Delvenne (2017) used the term extradiegetic to indicate an outer perspective, as when comparing policy narratives from a distance. Narratives are dynamic in that they adapt, evolve, lose support, or gain new subscribers. Narratives are attempts to mitigate dubiety, but any resultant ordering of reality is apt to come into conflict with other ways of ordering reality. Dubiety necessitates a narrative approach that can parse the varying perspectives.

1 Facts, Goals, and Narratives

Early in the growth of narrative policy inquiry, Kaplan (1986) saw a justification for a narrative approach under conditions where criteria, goals, and objectives cannot be clearly articulated or agreed upon. I would add facts to this mix of things that are often problematic. Establishing facts is important in public policy analysis—even if pursued as an aspirational ambition rather than a completely achievable accomplishment. If facts exist as some dictionaries say they do, as indisputable truth, narrative policy analysis likely would not be worth spending a lot of time on. A singular, indisputable narrative would dominate; pluralistic competition among narratives would be pointless; politics would be inert. Contestation over goals, facts, or both is the rule and not the exception in formulating public policy in a pluralistic democracy. And this is where narrative inquiry offers advantages.

Scientific norms of inquiry have the most prestige in establishing facticity, but the actual research methods deployed to establish the facts vary considerably among scientific disciplines, and within each discipline as well. There is no single scientific method, as in the scientific method. Mainstream, modern social science embraces quantification, neutrality, and objectivity—an approach variously described as naturalism, positivism, or scientism depending on one’s assessment of it. My own comfort level with scientific norms leads me to trust the findings about climate change, greenhouse gas emissions and many other questions that have entered the political realm. Sometimes facts can be established as effectively true, or at least as persuasive and convincing among members of a convention-sharing community. However, Poovey (1998) notes that the modern fact severs the connection between description and interpretation, and she demurs because this assumption does not withstand scrutiny. There are no theory-free facts, value-free-facts, politics-free facts, language-free facts, or culture-free facts. There are no narrative-free facts. Metze and Dodge (2016) show how facts diverge among policy discourse coalitions. There is a playing field of competing interpretations, uncertainties, doubts, and irresolutions that one must accept once one acknowledges that fact’s status as objective descriptor of indisputable truth is aspirational at best. This predicament does not gesture toward nihilism or cynicism, but instead signals a need to study policy narratives with a focus on their meanings.

The term dubiety refers to the ambiguity we language-using humans must negotiate in fending off one dang thing after another. The core concern is the problem of meaning-making. The difficulty seems pronounced in the age of rapid information technology, including traditional modes of communication such as television and radio, but also the high-velocity modes of communication such as the Internet, social media, and smart phones. Dubiety is not exclusive to high-tech communication media nor to postindustrial anxiety, though it obviously thrives there. With respect to the Internet, Warraich (2018) complains that “Dr. Google” has given terrible advice regarding the side effects of statins, vaccines, and alternative cancer therapies. For medical research, the dubiety goes deeper than Internet searches. “False positives and exaggerated results in peer-reviewed scientific studies have reached epidemic proportions in recent years. The problem is rampant in economics, the social sciences and even the natural sciences, but it is particularly egregious in biomedicine. Many studies that claim some drug or treatment is beneficial have turned out not to be true” (Ioannidis 2011).

2 Cannabis Policy Discourse

In the chapters of this book, I focus on claims made in public policy discourse, with most illustrations coming from policy-related discussions of cannabis in the United States. The discourse on cannabis policy in the United States is replete with claims based on different interpretations of the facts, different facts altogether, different concerns and different aspirations. The cannabis discourse was characterized for many years by the near-prohibition of scientific research on the effects of cannabis. The claims made for and against this plant are sometimes dubious, and some have a long history. Cannabis policy discourse, the main exhibit room for the Narrative Politics model I am about to lay out, was chosen especially for its evolving nature, and for the diversity of perspectives engaged in political contestation. Public opinion has moved rapidly with respect to this policy concern, at least in recent years. Some policy narratives remain remarkably durable while other ebb, flow, recede, and ascend. Some narratives dominate in certain time periods; they lose that domination in other time periods; new narratives emerge. Previously dismissed narratives regain coherence and meaning, coming to pose challenges to decohering dominant narratives.

Other features of the cannabis policy discourse that make it attractive as an exemplar for the Narrative Politics model have to do with the curious structure of status quo policy in the United States. Medical cannabis is illegal at the federal level but legal in most of the states. And states vary among themselves in terms of the legal status of adult-use, recreational cannabis and the punishments prescribed for possessing it; some have decriminalized possession of small quantities and others continue to impose long prison sentences. Including Washington, DC, there are 51 different polities at the state level, plus a broad national polity at the federal level. The exhibit room for this book is necessarily limited to the discourse in the United States, though Canada, Uruguay, and other nations with diverse polities are witnessing rapid change in cannabis policy.

Even when devoid of ideological dogma, scientific studies of the medicinal, psychological, and behavioral consequences of this plant vary widely in their conclusions. Psychological effects can range from relaxation and happy euphoria, on one end of the pole, to panic, paranoia and psychosis on the other. Dubiety and ambiguity prevail in multiple dimensions of the discourse.

3 All Words Lie

I intend for the Narrative Politics model to have potential application beyond cannabis policy and beyond the United States. In all domains of public policy discourse there are echo chambers, self-referential bubbles, and fragmentation, serving to unmoor policy consensus among the polity. When prominent liars, bullshitters, or idea marketers deliberately weaponize uncertainty and ambiguity to distract and misrepresent, the problem becomes more pronounced. Postings of deepfake videos on the Internet are but one manifestation of this phenomenon (Rini 2019).

Dubiety undermines aspirations for goal consensus and goal clarity. For public policy implementation, clear and stable goals would be desirable for those public administrators whose job it is to implement the statutes and directives. But scholars also realize this desired condition is a bit of a pipe dream. Ambiguity is a way of life in the world of policy implementation. The problem is not merely that legislative bodies sometimes leave goals vague in order to win majority support for a bill, or that opponents of the legislation continue to be opposed to the policy even after enactment. Without a common agreement on goals and facts in a policy domain, the idea of a sustained, broad consensus may be out of the question. If there were such a consensus in any given moment, it would not survive if people change their minds, or if a previously excluded faction weighs in at the next political moment.

Beyond our inherited capacity for empathy (de Waal 2009), human sociality benefits from a distinct aptitude for symbolic communication. Humans have an unequalled talent for abstraction. We categorize and sort; we use metaphors. Linguistic talents are useful in telling stories and for philosophizing. Such talents also generate an unavoidable tendency toward hypostatization—to misconstrue our word constructs as something akin to a concrete reality. Hypostatization infers that abstractions of language are assigned reality status. Humans make things of mere concepts. Humans also exaggerate and lie, which is inherent in language (Eco 1976). For Eco, a sign is anything that can be substituted for some other thing. This “other thing” does not have to be present, and does not even have to exist at the moment a sign stands in for it. “Thus semiotics is ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Dubiety
• 2. Narrative as Meaning-Unit
• 3. Narrative Subscription
• 4. Narrative Evolution in Cannabis Policy Discourse
• 5. Implementation
• 6. Post-implementation Critical Narratives
• 7. Assessing the Narrative Politics Model
• Back Matter