Scholarly Work - Political Science
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://scholarworks.montana.edu/handle/1/2919
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Item Narratives and the Policy Process: Applications of the Narrative Policy Framework(Montana State University Library, 2022) Jones, Michael D.; McBeth, Mark K.; Shanahan, Elizabeth A.A long history of literature describes how stories are central to how humans understand and communicate about the world around them. The NPF applies these discoveries to the policy process, whereby narratives are meaning-making tools used to capture attention and influence policy outcomes. Conceived at the Portneuf School of Narrative in the early part of the century and formally named in 2010, the Narrative Policy Framework’s (NPF) initial purpose was to scientifically understand the relationship between narratives and the policy process. Since its seminal naming, the NPF’s charter has expanded to non-scientific approaches (Gray & Jones, 2015; Jones and Radaelli, 2015), to science and policy communication, as well as proclaiming normative commitments to both science and democracy. Recently, guideline publications have also been produced that provide detailed instructions about how to conduct NPF research. Along the way several summary pieces have chronicled the NPF’s development. Two of these NPF assessments were part of larger collections of NPF studies, including the 2014 edited volume The Science of Stories and a special NPF symposium issue featured in the Policy Studies Journal. On par with NPF collections emerging every four years, here we offer a third collection of NPF studies that represent some of the best NPF studies to date.Item Narratives and the Policy Process: Applications of the Narrative Policy Framework. Chapter 3: Stepping Forward: Towards a More Systematic NPF with Automation(Pressbooks, 2022) Wolton, Laura P.; Crow, Deserai A.; Heikkila, TanyaAdvancements in automated text analysis have substantially increased our capacity to study large volumes of documents systematically in policy process research. The Narrative Policy Framework (NPF)—which promotes empirical analysis of narratives—has the potential to usher policy narrative research along the same path. Using the NPF and existing semi-automated analysis tools, we investigate the relationship between narrative components—namely, characters and proposed solutions—and the more “skeletal” frames that tie policy narrative elements to one another. To illustrate how these tools can advance policy narrative research, we auto-code 5,708 state and local news articles focusing on hydraulic fracturing of oil and gas. The findings suggest that the use and role of characters and policy solutions are portrayed in significantly different ways depending on the frame used. By using an autocoding approach, these findings increase our methodological and theoretical understanding of the relationship between narrative elements and frames in policy narratives. In discussing these findings, we also consider their implications for how issue frames matter theoretically in the NPF.