Narrative strategies in the policy process: social and cognitive foundations

Abstract

Public policy decisions are often attributed to narrative strategies that impact policy-oriented learning within and across advocacy coalitions. Public policy research recognizes the role of influential individuals and their narrative strategies in this context. Yet frameworks that have been developed through this research lack sufficient guidance to distinguish individual learners. By combining theories of dual learning and public policy processes, this paper presents new strategies to better operationalize the concept of an individual learner, measure micro-level learning and thus the impact of narrative strategies. In particular four lessons are deduced from this literature and applied to empirical research into the rise of the sustainable mobility narrative in British road policy: First, policy learners interpret the world through the lens of their beliefs, and learn by combining heuristics and analytical processing. Second, they learn in different ways according to their education and experiences. Third, learning occurs in a political environment that is shaped to different extents by entrepreneurial and brokerage strategies promoting specific narratives. Fourth, exogenous factors impact these strategies, as does policy-oriented learning.

Keywords:

• Narrative strategies
• policy change
• learning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Detailed discussions on the ways to detect and measure the development of narratives in congressional hearings, newspaper articles or the social media can be found, for example, in Shanahan et al. (2018); Gupta et al. (2016)

2 The concept of devil shift describes a situation caused by individuals valuing losses more than gains and consequently assigns far more influence to indviduals with dissimilar beliefs than those individuals actually hold (see also Tversky Kahnemans Prospect Theory). From this it is predicted that all individuals are either connected to or separated from each other on basis of shared beliefs.

3 This is based on the conceptualization of a policy broker found in Kingdon (1995) and Jones et al. (2009).

4 It must be noted here that advocacy scholars currently also define as an entrepreneur individuals who construct a particular narrative but do not engage in its promotion for a long period of time (Weible and Ingold 2018). The here presented discussion will hopefully help to better distinguish the one from the other.

5 First, we consulted a database that recorded details for all the Commons Transport Select Committee inquires that addressed at least one road-related topic; for example the name of an inquiry participant, their function (meeting chair, inquirer, witness) and the narrative that she advocated at the time. A total of 711 persons participated between January 1980 and December 2012. Twenty-two of these engaged in at least two of the seven time periods studied (including 1980-84, 1985-89, 1990-94, 1995-99, 2000-04, 2005-09, 2010-12) and thus had an opportunity to revise their narrative strategy. This choice is grounded onto research discussed in Sabatier and Christopher (2007) that suggests that policy-core beliefs remain stable for ten or more years. We deduced from this that any person engaged in the discourse for at least two five-year periods should exhibit signs of either specialization or change. Only ten of these twenty-two persons presented a policy narrative during the inquiry, information that was necessary for the analysis of the impact of specific narratives strategies. In a second step, we added to this list of ten two transport minister (Brian Mawhinney, Alistair Darling) and one committee advisor (Stephen Glaister). All three were identified as entrepreneurs in related research but had fallen through the initial raster for this analysis.