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. Chapter 10: Innovations and Future Directions for the Narrative Policy Framework(Pressbooks, 2022) Shanahan, Elizabeth A.; McBeth, Mark K.; Jones, Michael D.The NPF started as an iterative scientific journey exploring whether narratives play a role in the policy process. Because we were prepared to be wrong—even warned and such—we never would have predicted what the next fifteen years would yield. Yet, two things happened. First, our results held over time, indicating that narratives could be systematically and thus reliably studied as a critical mechanism of policy change. Second, scholarly interest in the NPF exploded. Thus, with the NPF’s seminal naming, subsequent articles, and the first edited volume, we set out to create a comprehensive framework for the study of narratives in the policy process.Item Narratives and the Policy Process: Applications of the Narrative Policy Framework. Chapter 9: A Narrative Policy Framework Solution to Understanding Climate Change Framing Research(Pressbooks, 2022) Wolters, Erika Allen; Jones, Michael D.The climate change framing literature is vast. So much so that researchers—whether seasoned framing scholars or those foraying into climate change framing research for the first time—can easily be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of studies, the vast array of concepts deployed, the variation in how these same concepts are operationalized, the nuance of a barely numerable assortment of contexts, and the effects all of the aforementioned have on interpreting findings. Here we offer a synthetic review of said literature, focusing on adaptation and mitigation framing studies and findings. In so doing, we first briefly distill the overall developmental arc of climate change framing research. We then provide a conventionally styled thematic overview of the mitigation and adaptation climate change studies. Among other conclusions, we find that while there has been a proliferation of climate change framing research, the findings and the studies themselves are often quite disparate from one another. Moreover, as the literature speaks to itself intermittently and in an ad hoc fashion, it is not readily apparent how climate change framing studies holistically fit together. As a solution to this problem, we offer the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) as a narrative heuristic to help climate change researchers and communicators organize and understand the literature. We argue that an NPF integration of this inherently unwieldy literature increases the likelihood of research utilization and improves the ability of climate change communicators to inform people about the risks of climate change.Item Narratives and the Policy Process: Applications of the Narrative Policy Framework. Chapter 8: A Nonviolent Narrative for European Integration?(Pressbooks, 2022) Baldoli, Roberto; Radaelli, Claudio M.Can we craft a narrative of European integration that contrasts populist narratives while resonating with the concerns of disaffected citizens? If this task is feasible, how do we leverage the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) to pursue a normative aim, and what are the implications of this normative mode of analysis? To answer these questions, we start from the core properties shared by populist narratives of the European Union. Then we present a possible alternative narrative, grounded in nonviolence as an analytical and normative framework. We compare setting, characters, plot, and moral of the story—first in the populist version and then in the nonviolent alternative. We find that nonviolence can be geared towards a narrative response to the populist account of European integration. We discuss the potential and implications of our normative contribution in terms of ethics and responsibility, contrasting constructive and destructive normative NPF.Item Narratives and the Policy Process: Applications of the Narrative Policy Framework. Chapter 7: Sanctuary Cities, Focusing Events, and the Solidarity Shift: A Standard Measurement of the Prevalence of Victims for the Narrative Policy Framework(Pressbooks, 2022) Smith-Walter, Aaron; Fritz, Emily; O’Doherty, ShannonNumerous state and local jurisdictions across the United States have adopted policies limiting their cooperation with federal deportation efforts carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Sometimes referred to as “sanctuary cities,” these jurisdictions interpret federalism in a way that resists active participation in federal immigration enforcement. Employing the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF), we analyze 164 public consumption documents to examine policy narratives disseminated by interest groups engaged in the policy debate surrounding sanctuary cities between 2010 and 2017. Using data derived from a content analysis of these documents, we develop a new measure, the solidarity shift, to capture the prevalence of victims in policy narratives; we find there are significant differences in the narrative strategies employed by advocates and opponents of sanctuary jurisdictions, with opponents’ narratives demonstrating more active responses to external events and a higher proportion of victims, relative to other characters. We also find that the killing of Kathryn Steinle in San Francisco can be seen as a focusing event because of the narrative actions of anti-sanctuary city advocates and their reliance on the solidarity shift, which resulted in significant changes to anti-sanctuary city narrative strategies.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.Item Narratives and the Policy Process: Applications of the Narrative Policy Framework. Chapter 5: Lost in Translation: Narrative Salience of Fear > Hope in Prevention of COVID-19(Pressbooks, 2022) Peterson, Holly L.; Zanocco, Chad; Smith-Walter, AaronUsing short, policy-image-like narratives, we explore the relationship between narrative agreement and narrative impacts in the case of COVID-19 in the US. Building upon previous research which identified attention narratives focusing on problems “stories of fear” and those focusing on solutions “stories of hope,” we use a narrative survey experiment of the general public (n=1000) to test the salience of problem and solution narratives and if they impact agreement with Center for Disease Control (CDC) prevention guidelines. Our findings are 1) fear story agreement is partisan but hope story agreement is not 2) fear story is the more salient of the two, 3) narrative agreement for both fear and hope were related to CDC safety guideline agreement, but were partisan, and 4) exposure to neither narrative impacted likelihood to agree with the guidelines as compared to a control group. Our findings are consistent with previous work indicating a Democratic party preference for stories of fear, where Democrats were more likely to support policy action. While we find that agreement with our narratives and guidelines is related, neither narrative treatment successfully altered support for CDC guidelines, suggesting a potential limit for the influence of narratives to either change or reorder existing preferences in highly salient and partisan issue areas like COVID-19 and suggesting a need for more research into the dynamics of narrative attention.Item Narratives and the Policy Process: Applications of the Narrative Policy Framework. Chapter 4: Agreement and Trust: In Narratives or Narrators?(Pressbooks, 2022) Lybecker, Donna L.; McBeth, Mark K.; Sargent, Jessica M.Narratives concerning the working class and their relationship to climate change are important. In particular, how the narrative constructs the relationship and, within this, who communicates a narrative (the narrator) is key. That said, this is a less studied element; the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) has limited research on narrators. Subsequently, this work examines individuals’ support of narratives and narrators using an Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) survey of 435 participants. After pretesting for climate change views, the subjects chose which narrator they expected to agree with: Mechanic Pat or Organic Farmer Chris. Through randomization, subjects joined either a congruent treatment group (Mechanic Pat tells the anti-climate change narrative and Organic Farmer Chris tells the pro-climate change narrative) or an incongruent treatment group (Mechanic Pat tells the pro-climate change narrative and Organic Farmer Pat tells the anti-climate change narrative). Results indicate that before reading the narratives, climate change “devotees” (those who agree that climate change is occurring and is human-caused) thought they would agree with Organic Farmer Chris over Mechanic Pat. Whereas there was division in the climate change “skeptics” (those who disagree that climate change is real and human-caused) on the question of what narrator they thought they would agree with. Devotees significantly supported the pro-climate change working-class narrative when told by Organic Farmer Chris as compared to when Mechanic Pat told the same narrative. Further showing the power of a narrator, devotees supported the anti-working class climate change narrative more when told by Organic Farmer Chris rather than when Mechanic Pat told the same narrative. Our findings demonstrate that narrators matter and suggest that the NPF needs to consider narrators as a narrative element worthy of further study.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.Item Narratives and the Policy Process: Applications of the Narrative Policy Framework. Chapter 2: Discourse Network Analysis of Nuclear Narratives(Pressbooks, 2022) Gupta, Kuhika; Ripberger, Joseph; Fox, Andrew; Jenkins-Smith, Hank; Silva, CarolThis study combines insight from discourse network analysis (DNA) and the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) to develop a new approach to studying narrative discourse within and across policy coalitions. The approach facilitates examination of narrative cohesion, which may impact the stability of coalitions as well as narrative discourse on policy change. We demonstrate the value of the approach by using it to study meta narratives on Twitter within and across groups of policy actors who support and oppose the expansion of nuclear energy in the United States. The approach reveals a variety of patterns that are unlikely to be seen using more common approaches to narrative policy analysis. Most notably, there were signs of narrative cohesion within both groups, but there were also slight fissures that may indicate strategic efforts to communicate with different constituents or fault lines that threaten group stability. These findings set the stage for future work on the relationship between narrative cohesion and policy outcomes.Item Narratives and the Policy Process: Applications of the Narrative Policy Framework. Chapter 1: A Brief Introduction to the Narrative Policy Framework(Pressbooks, 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. This introductory chapter provides a brief overview of the NPF and is followed by a short introduction to the contents of this volume.