Political Science
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Political Science faculty's diverse research, teaching and outreach activities engage our students and the community in issues of ethics, power, identity, globalization governance, citizenship and representation. Our faculty are active scholars with recent awards for their publications, outreach, service and teaching.
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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 6: Speaking from Experience: Medicaid Consumers as Policy Storytellers(Pressbooks, 2022) Colville, Kathleen; Merry, Melissa K.Kentucky’s proposed Medicaid reforms, initiated in 2016 and blocked in federal court in 2018 and again in 2019, elicited an extraordinary volume of public input on the value of Medicaid (publicly-funded health insurance for low-income individuals). Personal statements from current and former Medicaid consumers, through written comments submitted to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, offer insights into the strategies employed by a segment of the public that contributes infrequently to policy debates. Through a combination of manual and automated content analysis of a random sample of 1100 public comments, we analyze the policy narratives of participants, examining how narrative and non-narrative elements varied depending on commenters’ relationship to Medicaid consumers. Nearly all comments met (and most exceeded) the threshold for a policy narrative, while relatively few comments drew on research-based content typically considered privileged in the rule-making process. Further, these narrative elements cohered in distinct storylines from current and past Medicaid consumers and from those who identified as service providers. This research underscores the importance of narratives as sources of evidence in regulatory processes and suggests that public comments are fertile ground for research using the Narrative Policy Framework. This work also illuminates bottom-up narrative construction, a process thus far overlooked in micro-level research presuming that citizens are passive recipients of narratives, rather than producers themselves. For future work examining micro-level narrative production, we identify important considerations, including the role of narrator trust, audience, forms of evidence, setting, and the interaction between the meso and micro levels.