Narrative Policy Framework

The NPF holds that policy narratives share four structural elements: a setting (the policy context and its parameters), characters (heroes who promise to fix things, villains who cause harm, and victims who are harmed), a plot that connects the characters and situates the problem over time, and a moral of the story, which is the proposed policy solution. Beyond structure, narratives carry content cues tied to belief systems and political strategy, such as how the scope of conflict is portrayed and whether costs and benefits are framed as concentrated or diffuse.

The micro level studies how narratives influence individual beliefs and attitudes, often through survey experiments. The meso level examines how coalitions and groups strategically construct and deploy narratives within a policy subsystem, typically through content analysis of debates. The macro level considers how broad cultural and institutional narratives shape policy over long periods. Separating the levels lets the framework pose distinct, testable hypotheses appropriate to each scale of the policy process.

Interpretive approaches treat narratives as context-specific meanings to be understood through close, qualitative reading and generally reject claims to generalisable structure. The NPF, by contrast, adopts a positivist stance: it posits that policy narratives share a common, codeable structure and uses replicable measurement and hypothesis testing to study their effects. This is precisely the move that makes the NPF distinctive — and the source of ongoing debate with interpretivists who argue that coding narratives into variables sacrifices their essential meaning.