Introduction—Stories of the old world: The Narrative Policy Framework in the European context

Since their evolution, people around the world communicate stories—or narratives; be it ancient customs carried from one generation to the next concerning most diverse subjects such as Christmas, carnival, or agricultural traditions like cattle drive to and from the alpine pastures; be it today's international debates on climate change where for instance Brazil's president Jair Bolsonaro tells the story of “practically untouched” Amazon rain forests1 compared to the climate activist Greta Thunberg who angrily speaks about collapsing ecosystems and “the beginning of a mass extinction”2; or be it Jeff Bezos, former Amazon CEO, who banned PowerPoint presentations and instead relied on self-written memos that present the issue to be discussed and decided upon in the form of a story.3 In short, narratives are and have always been on everyone's lips. From a neurologic perspective, this is not at all surprising, because narratives are a common form of information processing and communication for humans’ limited cognitive capacities (Berinsky & Kinder, 2006). Stories impose order on a complex and chaotic environment by bundling attention and emotion to certain facets while fading others. In policy analysis, the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) embraces the analysis of narratives and their impact on the policy process. Like many policy process theories, this framework originates from the United States, where a plethora of studies applying the NPF have been conducted (see e.g., Gottlieb et al., 2018; Gupta et al., 2018; Jones, 2014; McBeth et al., 2012; Merry, 2019; Shanahan et al., 2013). This special issue demonstrates that there is also an active NPF research community outside the United States that is using and advancing the framework in significant and multifaceted ways. In the following, the special issue presents a diverse bouquet of NPF applications from Europe. It, thereby, also pays tribute to the NPF's versatility in application, from agenda setting to policy implementation, and in a wide variety of institutional and geographic settings. The goal of this special issue fits well with European Policy Analysis (EPA), which aims to present the European perspective on policy analysis and to test mainstream approaches in the European context. Previous EPA contributions or themed issues thus focused for instance on the Advocacy Coalition Framework (Nohrstedt & Olofsson, 2016), the Multiple Streams Framework (Deruelle, 2016; Leeuw et al., 2016; Sager & Thomann, 2017; Zohlnhöfer et al., 2015), or the Programmatic Action Framework (Bandelow & Hornung, 2021). The NPF is now the next to follow in this tradition. The NPF developed in the 1990s from work by Elizabeth Shanahan, Marc McBeth, and Michael Jones. It was first named and published in 2010 (Jones & McBeth, 2010). The framework assumes the central role of narratives in human communication and cognition, which consequently also exert a significant influence on policy actors and policy processes. In addition to this basic assumption, the NPF is based on four others (Shanahan et al., 2017, 178–79; Shanahan et al., 2018, 334): First, political reality is socially constructed. Second, social constructions of political realities, while variable, are not random but depend on factors such as values, norms, and beliefs (bounded relativity). Third, policy narratives are characterized by specific, generalizable structures (structuralist view). Fourth, policy narratives operate at three interacting levels of analysis, micro (individual), meso (group), and macro (institutions and culture). According to the NPF, a policy narrative consists of several components, which can be quantified and compared in a standardized manner: On the one hand, a narrative has a specific structure (or narrative form; Shanahan et al., 2017, 175–76). This includes the setting, which describes the context and the problem, the moral, which shows the solution, the plot, which organizes the action and finally different characters. The most used characters in NPF studies are the villain who causes a problem, the victim who suffers from it and the hero who solves the problem. On the other hand, a narrative has specific content, which varies depending on the context and the policy issue. To capture this, the NPF uses the concept of policy beliefs and three so-called narrative strategies. First, narratives can be used to enlarge or reduce the scope of conflict. Second, policy actors can use their narratives to portray opponents as evil and themselves as heroes (devil–angel shift). Third, narratives can be strategically constructed to establish causal links between a policy problem and its cause, thereby assigning responsibility or blame (causal mechanisms; Shanahan et al., 2017, 177–78). Despite the fact that the NPF has become an acknowledged policy process theory that features numerous theoretical and empirical applications, its potential remains far from being exploited (see e.g., Shanahan et al., 2017, 198–202). The European NPF community can contribute to this in a meaningful way by broadening the narrative research perspective. For instance, in addition to different historically grown cultures, institutions, societal beliefs, and values, European countries differ from the United States in having other political systems and forms of government such as multi-party systems, direct democracy but also authoritarian regimes. Furthermore, transnational institutionalized forms of co-operation such as the European Union (EU), which not only need to function across nations but also across linguistic and cultural borders, play a prominent role in Europe. To date, these perspectives have been barely incorporated into existing NPF research. The special issue at hand aimed to change this by providing a first platform to European NPF scholars, deriving avenues for future research from their contributions, and ultimately by bringing the two research communities closer together. The seven contributions in this special issue tap into the NPF’s potential by expanding it not only geographically and thematically but also conceptually. Table 1 provides an overview of the contributions. In the following, we discuss their findings in more detail and derive avenues for future NPF research. Four articles in this special issue focus on the further development of NPF components. Kuhlmann and Blum are concerned with the conceptualization of an important element of narratives that so far has received little attention compared to characters or strategies: plots. They refine the concept by saying that plots each have a universal and a policy-specific element; while the former element bases on Stone’s (2012) widely used plot types, the latter builds upon Lowi's well-known distinction between regulative, distributive, and redistributive policies. This new conceptualization gives rise to a typology, which, in turn, may be used for hypotheses within the NPF. Their empirical analysis examines the occurrence of different plot types in tweets from the German government during the first COVID-19 wave. Schlaufer et al. argue that despite the underlying importance of the policy problem within the NPF, a consistent approach of how to study this element is lacking. The authors indicate how this gap could be closed conceptually and suggest that the policy problem should be treated as a separate NPF component. In their contribution, they explore how problem definition in terms of complexity is strategically used in narratives to expand or contain a policy conflict in the context of Moscow's waste management. Thereby, they simultaneously demonstrate the NPF’s transferability to a non-democratic context. Vogeler et al. examine policies that are not in the center of public attention—unlike most NPF studies, which focus on highly politicized debates—and show the dominant role of the beneficiary character in such a context. They investigate two policy debates on new agri-food technologies in the European Parliament and convincingly argue that “(u)sing beneficiaries as part of a narrative strategy (…) is plausible in the context of policies that are negotiated among experts and largely without a public” (p. 340). Tosun and Schaub are concerned with the use of evidence as a potential new NPF strategy. In investigating the narrative construction of European Citizen Initiatives (ECI)—which have to be able to mobilize across countries, languages, and cultures—the authors show that evidence is strategically used by ECI initiators to expand the scope of conflict, that is, to underline the policy problem, to push their own solution, or to undermine the opposing solution. They also rely upon the devil-shift strategy to convince their audiences. Three articles combine the NPF with additional theories and frameworks. Dunlop et al., start this endeavor with an innovative combination of the NPF and the Institutional Grammar Tool (IGT); two frameworks that at first sight seem very different, but which—as the authors convincingly argue—have a common core and advance the NPF by “uncovering not only the stories policy actors tell but also what these stories mean in terms of institutional statements” (p. 365). The authors provide a demonstration of their combined approach by analyzing the four cases of EU, Malta, Finland, and Ireland regarding their guidelines for consultation processes during policy formulation. The IGT enriches the NPF by complementing findings on actors’ communication with information on their actions. Conversely, the NPF broadens results from the IGT by highlighting the moral and normative aspects of institutional grammar elements and by teasing out different narration styles found in official documents. Gjerstad and Fløttum present a combination of the NPF with a linguistic approach. Based on a Norwegian survey, the study analyzes what story citizens tell about whether they are willing to change their way of life to contribute to solutions against climate change. The survey answers are analyzed according to several linguistic concepts and mechanisms—capturing the narrative text sequence, the use of negation or polyphony, that is, multivoicedness—combined with the use of NPF characters. The results show that Norwegians simultaneously depict themselves as part of a collective that mostly plays a villain role, but also as heroic individuals. Furthermore, thanks to the analysis of polyphony, this linguistic NPF analysis not only allows to unravel the dominant narratives in a policy debate, but also “traces of the conflict characterizing the issue at a societal (thus macro-) level” (p. 402). In addition with their survey data, they are the only authors in this special issue conducting a microlevel NPF analysis, while all others investigate narratives at the mesolevel. Kuenzler suggests linking the NPF with research on the reputation of public organizations, an increasingly popular field of theory development in public administration research. By capturing the narratives circulating in the public about an organization, the NPF proves to be a fruitful approach to draw conclusions about an organization's reputation, as well as about developments over time. Empirically, the author analyzes the case of the Swiss Child and Adult Protection Agencies, a young agency type that experienced the "reputational worst-case scenario" p.408 and is nowadays known as "Switzerland's most-hated authority" (p. 408). The analysis reveals power shifts between the agencies and their target groups, and it allows for an in-depth look at specific criticisms that have been expressed about the agencies over time. For example, the narrative analysis shows how the target groups of the child and adult protection policy underwent changes from problem-causing villains to victims and even heroes, thereby demonstrating that the implementing agencies’ legitimacy was increasingly questioned over time. Besides advancing the NPF on a conceptual level, this special issue also demonstrates the framework's thematic and geographic versatility. While the thematic breadth has increased somewhat in recent years, since its inception the NPF’s focus has mostly been on environmental policy (Jones, 2018). Contributions in this special issue focus instead on topics as varied as COVID-19, waste management, agri-food technologies, climate change lifestyles, consultation procedures, and child and adult protection policy. In terms of geography, the following countries are represented: Finland, Germany, Ireland, Malta, Norway, Russia, and Switzerland. In addition, research on the institutional level of the EU is included. Inspired by the findings of the contributions in this special issue, we would like to share some concluding thoughts on avenues for future NPF research. First, the NPF’s components are at the heart of the framework. Their application and testing in as many policy contexts as possible, as well as their continuous further development, is key for the significance of the NPF as an established policy process theory. In this regard, we consider it promising to test further the plot typology developed by Kuhlmann and Blum, which “show(s) how, for regulatory, distributive, and redistributive types of policies, plots link policy-specific themes with universal themes in clearly distinguishable ways” (p. 295) and their newly formulated NPF hypothesis stating that “(g)roups and individuals employ plots to link policy-specific narrative elements and universal narrative elements” (p. 295). We also consider it promising to test the conceptualization of the policy problem along the notion of complexity as suggested by Schlaufer et al., the role of beneficiaries in more and less politicized debates as investigated by Vogeler et al., and the use of evidence as a potentially separate narrative strategy (Tosun and Schaub). Second, the NPF can be fruitfully linked to other theoretical approaches. In the past, this has for instance been done successfully with the Multiple Streams Framework (Ceccoli, 2019; McBeth & Lybecker, 2018). In this special issue, Gjerstad and Fløttum, Dunlop et al., and Kuenzler demonstrate the framework's versatility again by combining the NPF with approaches from linguistics, political science, and public administration. Such combinations—which of course have to be chosen with care and adapted if deemed necessary—on the one hand allow a deeper understanding of the research subject and on the other hand strengthen the NPF itself by refining or even complementing its components and hypotheses. Third, Vogeler et al. suggest that narrative use in more or less politicized debates may differ distinctly. Systematic comparative analysis of narratives in different types of policy processes—be they more technical, apolitical, or consensual versus highly contested and politicized—is, therefore, another promising approach for further advancing the NPF. Fourth, Schlaufer et al. begin to explore a potential avenue for further research on the use of narratives and the applicability of the NPF in non-democratic contexts. Their results show that similar mechanisms are at work compared to democratic settings—although the institutional features, limiting or enhancing participation and influence of various policy actor groups, obviously differ widely. To broaden the applicability of the NPF and learn more about policy actors’ use of narratives in different political contexts, additional research from Russia and from other non-democratic countries is needed. Fifth, we would like to mention a few aspects with a more specific regard to European policy issues. Tosun and Schaub show how narratives in the EU have to operate across countries, languages and cultures to make a difference. This multidimensionality may be a European specificity. However, we think that future research on this issue would also be an added value for large regions such as for instance Middle and South America or Asia. In a similar vein, with the European Parliament, Vogeler et al. focus on a venue where these different dimensions come together, and narratives have to convince in direct confrontations. This confluence of countries, languages and cultures is exciting, and the direct contrast or interaction could also give new insights into the macrolevel characteristics of narratives, an issue that is so far under-researched. Other multinational institutions and organizations such as the United Nations, the NATO, or Mercosur might be further interesting venues to investigate such inter-cultural dynamics. Sixth, Schlaufer et al. and Kuenzler shed light on another fascinating area: The role of narratives in policy implementation. Research on this stage of the policy cycle (Cairney, 2012) is generally scarce within the NPF, with a few notable exceptions (see e.g., Boscarino, 2020; O’Donovan, 2018). During implementation, a policy takes proper shape. Ideas, expectations, and interests of many different actors, such as street-level bureaucrats or interests groups representing target populations, come together. The program is refined and implementation structures are formed (see e.g., Lipsky, 2010; Pülzl & Treib, 2007)—in short, the policy process continues during implementation. Therefore, we see no reason to assume that narratives should not play an equally influential role in shaping a policy in this stage. Still, a systematic and broadly applied approach in conducting implementation NPF analyses is far from being established and would clearly contribute to advancing the whole framework. Finally, Dunlop et al. are the only authors in this special issue to conduct a comparative case study that includes multiple nations. Following this direction, we could imagine some promising further studies, such as comparative NPF research combining cases from the United States or Europe with African or Central-Asian cases. Such studies would enable us to learn more about cultural, institutional, or societal effects on the creation and impact of policy narratives. Furthermore, they would contribute to the goal we mentioned earlier, that is, to bring NPF research across the oceans closer together. This is a goal we consider absolutely worth striving for—especially when we consider how narratives affect us all and are to be found in every human activity around the globe, independent of the geographic region where we live, the policy issue that is at stake, or the values and beliefs we hold. We are all storytelling human beings, or in NPF’s terminology homini narrantes. 自人类进化起, 全球人民便传播故事—或叙事; 无论是一代传给下一代的古老习俗, 例如圣诞节、狂欢节或农业传统 (从高山牧场来回赶牛) 等不同主题; 或是当下关于气候变化的国际辩论, (Berinsky & Kinder, (NPF) et al., 2018; Gupta et al., 2018; Jones, 2014; McBeth et al., 2012; Merry, 2019; Shanahan et al., (Nohrstedt & Olofsson, (Deruelle, 2016; Leeuw et al., 2016; Sager & Thomann, 2017; Zohlnhöfer et al., (Bandelow & Hornung, Elizabeth (Jones & McBeth, (Shanahan et al., 2017, 178–79; Shanahan et al., 2018, 334): (Shanahan et al., 2017, of (Shanahan et al., 2017, Shanahan et al., 2017, (EU), (2012) Tosun Gjerstad Gjerstad (Ceccoli, 2019; McBeth & Lybecker, Gjerstad 2020; O’Donovan, 2010; Pülzl & Treib, We would like to first and the for their which has in this diverse and innovative issue. thanks also to the numerous have been in the contributions. Finally, we would like to the EPA and for the to this special issue and for their continuous in its