A Narrative Approach to Understanding Public Policy DiscoursesDiscourses

The concept of narratives provides another lens for studying policy (media) discourses.¹⁶ In early works a narrative was simply understood as fragmented observations that were woven together to construct meanings and realities (McComas and Shanahan,1999, 36).

A content based narrative approach to study public policy-making was proposed byStone (2002). Her work focuses on analyzing story content to identify political values (McBeth et al.,2005) and is therefore highly relevant for studying policy discourses with the ACF.

Stone(2002, 156) understands narratives as an essential part of political maneuvering.

Thereby, policy participants formulate a strategic problem denition and apply narra-tives on policy problems in a way that one's favored course of action appears to be in the broad public interest (McBeth et al., 2005, 415). This is accomplished by framing the story in a way that creates innocent victims and heroes on one side, and clearly iden-tiable villains on the other, pitting forces of evil against forces of good (Stone, 2002, 138).Jones and McBeth(2010) introduce aNPF, which provides guidance to empirically test hypotheses on narratives in public policy-making. They dene a narrative as a story with four elements: (i) a setting or context, (ii) a temporal plot and causal mechanisms, (iii) archetypal characters, and (iv) the moral of the story.

Within the NPF, a setting or a context has to be provided for the narrative (Jones and McBeth, 2010, 340). This setting helps to understand underlying policy settings and in-stitutions. This context can be geographical, as for example in the work ofMcBeth et al.

(2005, 2007), who study narratives in the local policy conict within the Greater Yel-lowstone region. But often a suitable policy setting can also be provided without clear geographical boundaries, based on the basic assumptions of the policy controversy (Ney, 2006, 152) (Jones and McBeth, 2010, 340), as for example in the work of Verweij et al.

16The authors applying the narrative approach speak of `debates' rather than `discourses' (see for example McBeth et al.,2007). Since the two terms are essentially meaning the same underlying concept, the present work refers solely to `discourses', in order to have a consisting language.

(2006) and Verweij and Thompson (2006) on culturally diering narratives on climate change.

The temporal aspect of narratives is a key dierence to other conceptssuch asHajer's (1993) story lines or frames (McComas and Shanahan, 1999, 37; Entman, 1993; Taylor, 2000). A narrative aims not only to provide a context for previously unconnected aspects, but to tell a story. This story has clear temporal elements (Jones and McBeth, 2010;

McBeth et al.,2005;Roe,1994;Stone,2002) and introduces causal mechanisms which are responsible for or able to solve a certain policy problem (Jones and McBeth,2010;Stone, 2002).

Through the determination of archetypal characters, the `story-teller' constructs who wins and who loses in a policy story (or who reaps the benets and pays the costs) (Mc-Beth et al., 2007, 88). Through the chosen language the `story-teller' denes the heroes, the villains, and the victims of a policy problem (Jones and McBeth, 2010; Jacobs and Sobieraj, 2007;McBeth et al., 2005; Ney,2006; Stone, 2002). The context, the plot, and the characters are shaped in a way that a moral of the story can be provided (Jones and McBeth, 2010, 340). According to the story-teller, this moral leads to one logically derived policy solution, which supports the heroes and does justice to the victims and villains (Ney and Thompson, 2000; Ney, 2006; Stone, 2002; Verweij et al., 2006; Verweij and Thompson,2006).

The drama and the value of the story are hereby much more important than the inher-ent risk of the underlying problem (Greenberg et al.,1989;Barton,1988;Mazur and Lee, 1993;McComas and Shanahan,1999). Furthermore, the clearer the proposed victim-hero-villain-triangle is, the easier is it for policy participants to propose their putatively only logical solution for the policy problem.

Opponents and supporters of a project will frame the whole process dierently in or-der to activate action and public perception in their favor. In oror-der to unor-derstand how these varying narratives could be shaped, an example with potential narratives for and against the construction of a pumped storage hydro power station is provided: Supporters of the power station are expected to frame the project positive in terms of energy secu-rity, advancing the energy transition, and thus reducing the necessity for nuclear power.

They would blame the conventional energy suppliers as villains, harming the environment through coal red power production and setting the population at risk through nuclear power production. The residents would then be the victims that suer through the envi-ronmental and potential safety risks. At the same time, the residents could become the heroes by changing their situation to the better through supporting the construction of the storage facility. Opponents of the same project would focus on the drawbacks of the new facility. They will shape the narrative in a way that actors who support the con-struction willingly compromise major burdens for the population in order to further their

own interests. Residents would again be viewed as the victims, but this time as victims of the burdens that will arise during the building and maintenance of the storage facility in their direct neighborhood.

McBeth et al. (2007, 88) argue that narratives are the lifeblood of politics. They un-derstand narratives as a combination of the visible outcome[s] of dierences in policy beliefs (McBeth et al., 2005) as well as the visible outcome[s] of political strategizing.

According to this view, discourses and narratives can be understood as the visible image of internal beliefs and strategies of the policy participants. This stands in contrast to Hajer's (2007) discourse theory, which argues that policy participants do not enter the discourse with xed preferences and beliefs, but that all interest are constructed by and within the discourse.

Furthermore, the literature on narratives is not consistent when it comes to understand-ing the way recipients process those dierent narratives. Accordunderstand-ing to Fisher (1987, 88), objective criteriasuch as coherence, consistency, and delityplay an important role when humans evaluate narratives (McComas and Shanahan,1999, 36). However,McBeth et al.(2005, 419) advance the view that policy participants pay selective attention to the evidence, and competitive groups examining the same evidence tend to interpret it dier-ently. This eect is also known as biased assimilation, which assumes that policy actors tend to interpret evidence in a way that supports their prior beliefs and values(Henry, 2011b, 365) (see also Lord et al., 1979; Munro and Ditto, 1997; Corner et al., 2012).

Schon and Rein (1994, 4) go to such lengths to argue that policy controversies are im-mune to resolution by appeal to the facts. Contrary, the results from Shanahan et al.

(2011b, 390f.) indicate that narratives might indeed be able to overcome prior beliefs of recipients, at least in the short term. They are able to show that narratives `preach to the choir' when the writers and the recipients hold similar opinions. At the same time, the results indicate that narratives which are read by recipients with divergent opinions lead to a convergence of opinions. AsShanahan et al. (2011b, 391) point out themselves, these results run counter to the long-standingACF assumption concerning policy belief stability, and are indeed contrary to the eect of biased assimilation. This brief overview shows that the question of how recipients process narratives is far from being fully an-swered.

The NPF and the ACF emphasize the importance of the inherent view of policy partic-ipants and narrative recipients. Both frameworks assume that policy particpartic-ipants enter the discourse with a set of beliefs, which they want to translate into policy. However, slight dierences between theNPFand theACFhave to be mentioned. Within theACF, the belief system is understood as the primary driver for an organizations understanding of and behavior around a certain policy problem (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith,1999). As explained in detail in section 4.1, the ACF distinguishes between three layers of beliefs:

deep core beliefs, policy core beliefs, and secondary aspects. Shared policy core beliefs are hereby understood as the `glue' that makes advocacy coalitions stick together (Sabatier, 1988, 141).

According to theNPF, explaining behavior of organizations and the cohesion of advocacy coalitions solely by (shared) beliefs has a substantial shortcoming: It lacks the essential part of political strategies that organizations and advocacy coalitions pursue. The NPF is thus not based on the concept of the three-layered belief system (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith, 1993, 30-31), where secondary beliefs are understood as instrumental decisions of policy implementation (McBeth et al., 2007, 89), but rather distinguishes between primary beliefs and dynamical political strategieswhich are not necessarily beliefs (Mc-Beth et al., 2007, 89f.).

As this brief overview shows, discourse analysis adds another angle on policy processes by emphasizing the importance of discourses, arguments, and storytelling in policy decision-making. Yet, its reputation suers from the criticism that it is not based on scientic grounds, that results are not replicable and highly subjective. TheNPFbyJones and Mc-Beth(2010) anticipates this criticism and sets scientic standards that allow the building and testing of hypothesis in a transparent and systematic way (Weible et al., 2011, 353).

Shanahan et al.(2011a) show how the analysis of policy narratives within theNPFhelps to widen the ACF by marrying bounded rationality and belief systems with an inter-pretation of social construction in assessing how coalitions engage in strategic framing.

(Weible et al., 2011, 353). This widening will be utilized in this thesis by understanding statements in the discourse as being part of narratives, which are strategically framed in order to shape public opinion and thereby translate underlying policy beliefs into policies.

This thesis benets from the rich examples of systematic, transparent, and hypotheses-driven content analysis provided by the works of McBeth et al. (2005), McComas and Shanahan (1999) and Shanahan et al. (2011b).

4.3.2 A Discursive Approach to Understanding Public