The Science of Stories

Applications of the Narrative Policy Framework in Public Policy Analysis

M. Jones, E. Shanahan, M. McBeth, M. Jones, E. Shanahan, M. McBeth

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137485861
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

The study of narratives in a variety of disciplines has grown in recent years as a method of better explaining underlying concepts in their respective fields. Through the use of Narrative Policy Framework (NPF), political scientists can analyze the role narrative plays in political discourse.

CHAPTER 1

Introducing the Narrative Policy Framework

Michael D. Jones, Mark K. McBeth, and Elizabeth A. Shanahan

Introduction

You will stir up little controversy by asserting that human beings are storytelling animals. We all have at least a rough accounting of what a story is. Stories progress from beginnings, through middles, and have endings. They are composed of characters. There is a plot situating the story and characters in time and space, where events interact with the actions of the characters and the world around them to make the story worthy of telling in the first place. We have all told stories. We have all listened to stories. Indeed, even our thoughts and emotions seem bound by the structure of story. It is not surprising then that whole academic disciplines have been devoted to the study of story and that whole careers have been largely dedicated to a single story or a single storyteller such as William Shakespeare or Mark Twain. We are thus, in a sense, homo narrans, and there is something about story—or narrative—that feels uniquely human. Consider this: pause for a moment and try to imagine communication without story . . . .

We expect that during your pause such a speculation was hard to fathom. If stories are so constitutive of human existence that we could easily consider them distinct aspects of the human condition and so fundamental that we cannot easily imagine communication without them, then it follows that stories are, at the very least, important. And if stories are important for us as individuals, then it also probably follows that stories must play an important role for groups and the collective actions in which these groups engage, such as those present in the processes, outcomes, implementation, and designs of public policy. It is from this seemingly banal premise that the narrative policy framework (NPF) was born. Let’s briefly consider some possible examples of the role of stories in public policy.

A short yet devastatingly powerful story resides in the famous letter Apostle Paul wrote to the Christian Church of Rome (Romans 1:24–32). The story goes something like this: many in Rome had turned away from God to worship “. . . the creature more than the creator.” In their love of the earthly creature, men and women had succumbed to “vile affections” that “burned in their lust” for their same sex and were “worthy of death.” The staying power of this story is seen through its citation by present-day anti-gay stakeholders, such as the Westboro Baptist Church, that use this biblical story to motivate its members to mobilize against homosexuals by engaging in activities such as protests at the funerals of recently deceased American service personnel. Thus, it is fairly easy to conclude that the reach of Apostle Paul’s narrative is great, reverberating through history to shape and impact the lives of millions of homosexuals through public policies and the actions of their implementers. Bear in mind, not a single shred of scientific evidence exists that would indicate homosexuals have turned away from a deity of any sort; yet the persecution of homosexuals via sanctioned public policy continues. This is an example of the power of narrative. Scanning the policy topography, it is not hard to find similarly compelling examples.

In 1949, Hovland, Lumsdaine, and Shefield published psychological studies assessing the power of World War II educational and propaganda films. Examining films such as the Battle for Britain, the researchers concluded that the narratives within these films may very well have been powerful enough to have influenced the “almost superhuman efforts of the British people and the Royal Air Force . . . to {never} give up even in the face of apparently hopeless odds” (Hovland et al. 1949, p. 24, cited in Green and Brock 2005, p. 121). More recently, Oreskes and Conway (2010) spin a much less optimistic tale than Hovland and his colleagues. Using historic examples of how scientific doubt was manufactured to shape public opinion about acid rain, the dangers of smoking, and the ozone hole, Orsekes and Conway chronicle the strategic use of narrative and other forms of communication to similarly manufacture doubt about climate change. While the linkages between narrative and policy outcomes is tenuous in the Hovland et al. (1949) and Oreskes and Conway (2010) examples, research findings across a collection of academic disciplines are making it possible to begin to make such connections in a scientifically verifiable manner. The NPF incorporates these findings to do just that.

Research findings that speak to the importance of narrative in public policy can be found across many academic disciplines. Marketing research shows that narrative advertising techniques are more persuasive than other techniques such as price point advertising (e.g., Mattila 2000). Furthermore, findings in communication (e.g., Morgan et al. 2009) and psychology (e.g., Green and Brock 2005) show that the more a person becomes immersed in a story the more persuasive the story. Findings in political science also show that individuals use narrative structures to cognitively organize new information (Berinsky and Kinder 2006). Neuroscience, which has increasingly become involved in the study of narrative, has a large collection of studies showing the importance of narrative for individual autobiographical memory, self-conceptions, its role in establishing reasoning for individual actions (see Walker 2012), and has also made considerable progress in mapping the areas of the brain responsible for narrative processing (see Mar 2004). While literary scholars (see Herman 2009) have pioneered the theories used to study narrative, the recent trend in most academic disciplines is toward increased methodological sophistication and more generalizable findings, all of which have begun to provide for a scientific understanding of narrative and its role in human understanding and behaviors. Until 2010, when NPF was formally named, the academic discipline of public policy was an outlier in terms of this trend.

To be clear, a considerable amount of scholarship was produced in the 1990s that examined the role of narrative in shaping public policy. During this time, narrative theorizing was pioneered by scholars such as Emery Roe (1994), Deborah Stone (1989), Frank Fischer and J. Forrester (1993), and Maarten Hajer (1995). However, this brand of narrative scholarship—termed in the policy field “post-positive”—was primarily interpretative in the sense that it was highly descriptive, generally rejected scientific standards of hypothesis testing and falsifiability, and thus lacked the clarity to be replicated and allow for generalization. Mainstream policy scholarship by and large rejected this interpretative approach, which created a de facto division in the field that left the mainstream abandoning narrative to the post-positivists. This line in the sand is clearly illuminated with the publication of Paul Sabatier’s edited book Theories of the Policy Process in 1999, which specifically excluded work in social construction and narrative. When challenged about the exclusion of social construction and narrative from the edited volume (e.g., Radaelli 2000), Sabatier crystallized the emerging division in public policy with a stern admonishment, stating that he had no interest in popularizing an approach to public policy that could not be “clear enough to be wrong” (2000, p. 137). Sabatier was right in the sense that post-positive scholarship wasn’t clear enough to be wrong; but the post-positivists were right about one thing: narrative matters and the science supporting their interpretative descriptions is ubiquitous just about everywhere but public policy. NPF was born out of these events and, at the most basic level, NPF is an attempt to apply objective methodological approaches (i.e., science) to subjective social reality (i.e., policy narratives). In other words, like the post-positivists, we think narrative seems to matter for public policy; however, unlike the post-positivists, we think the best way to discern how, when, and why, is through the use of the scientific method.

NPF’s Ontology and Epistemology

The debate between mainstream public policy scholarship and the post-positivists is not new. In fact, these foundational disagreements present in the public policy literature are found elsewhere and date at least as far back as the Sophists and Socrates and are derivative of ancient arguments about the nature of reality and how best we can understand that reality, or in philosophical terms, ontology and epistemology, respectively. Although perhaps a bit esoteric, there have been misrepresentations of NPF in the policy literature (e.g., Miller 2012); thus, for the sake of clarity, it is worthwhile to dedicate a few lines of text to spell out NPF’s take on what reality is (ontology) and how we can come to understand that reality (epistemology) before we delve into the specifics of the framework itself.

Simply put, NPF applies an objective epistemology (i.e., science) to a subjective ontology (social reality) (Radaelli et al. 2012, p. 2). While we do believe there is a real world out there bound by natural laws such as gravity, we also align with a post-positivist perspective that all concepts are not created equal and thus vary in their stability. Although some concepts like gravity are rarely contested and taken as a given, other socially constructed concepts such as race, gender, environment, and the like are often the source of heated disputes. It is precisely these less stable concepts that form the core of any policy debate. NPF accepts that much of the policy reality we aim to understand has concepts (i.e., variables) that are moving targets, with meanings that at least subtly, if not overtly, change. Thus, we accept there is an objective world out there, but we also more fundamentally accept that when it comes to public policy, what that world means varies tremendously. Given what we know about narrative’s role in cognition and communication, NPF offers the simple suggestion that if you want to understand that meaning, you need to understand the policy narratives relevant players use to make sense of their policy reality. NPF uses an objective epistemology, meaning that we use scientific methods to study the variation in socially constructed realities. We never claim to identify which narrative is right, only that we can systematically study the variation of policy narratives in such a way that is clear enough to be wrong and that said variation may eventually help us explain policy outcomes, processes, and designs. Or, as noted in Smith and Larimer (2013, p. 233), work on NPF demonstrates “how a post-positivist theoretical framework might be employed to generate hypotheses that can be empirically tested.” In sum, NPF understands that narrative truths are socially constructed and that these policy realities may be systematically and empirically studied.

An Overview of the Narrative Policy Framework¹

The Problem of Narrative Relativity

Narrative scholars have commonly drawn a distinction between narrative form and content (see Jones and McBeth 2010). Narrative form refers to the structure of a narrative, while narrative content refers to the objects contained therein. This distinction is useful for NPF’s operationalization of narrative because it illuminates both the methodological and theoretical obstacles that NPF must address in its efforts to scientifically study policy narratives.

Perhaps beginning with Aristotle’s Poetics, structuralist accounts of narrative speak to narrative form by asserting that there are distinct generalizable narrative components such as characters and plot that exist across different contexts (e.g., Genette 1983; Propp 1968; Saussure 1965). Post-structural accounts of narrative vehemently reject such propositions, asserting that each interpretation of a narrative is sui generis and thus unique to the interaction between the narrative and the individual determining its meaning (e.g., Derrida 1981). Both structural and post-structural accounts of narrative agree that the content of narrative is not generalizable. We term the post-structural take on form and both the post-structural and structural takes on narrative content as the problem of narrative relativity, which is essentially an assertion that due to unique context and individual interpretation, narratives cannot be studied scientifically. In public policy scholarship, narrative relativity has been a position of orthodoxy where the study of narratives is seen as simply incompatible with the scientific method (e.g., Dodge et al. 2005).

Given that narrative relativity is no small problem, NPF offers several operational strategies to mediate and possibly overcome the problem. First, and related to narrative form, NPF takes a specifically structural position, defining generalizable and context-independent narrative elements consisting of a setting, characters, a plot, and a moral of the story. Second, while we understand that narrative content is contextual in the sense that a narrative about climate change policy cannot be morphed into a narrative about gun control, we also expect that while meaning may be relative, it is not random. Specifically, we advocate the use of tried and tested belief system measures such as Cultural Theory (e.g., Thompson, Ellis, and Wildavsky 1990) and ideology to look for aggregate tendencies in assigning meaning to context-specific objects (i.e., people, symbols, evidence, etc.) by audiences and narrators as well as looking for strategies whereby actors strategically manipulate narrative content to shape policy. Both belief systems and strategies are discussed in more detail below.

The Form: Policy Narrative Elements

Taking a structural stance on narrative, NPF rejects the post-structural claim that narratives are completely relative by beginning from a clear and concise operationalization of policy narratives. These na...