Research Design and the Narrative Policy Framework

Abstract

Theories of public policy identify policy actors as playing an important role in the policy process. In the study of policy actors, there are a myriad of foci including how they overcome collective action issues (Ostrom 1990), how they form coalitions and learn from each other (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1993), the important role of individual entrepreneurs (Kingdon 1984), and how policy actors use policy images (Baumgartner and Jones 1993) or framing (Rochefort and Cobb 1994) to gain favor for a policy position. These empirical research agendas in part examine how policy actors influence public policy, but in their examination, they do not critically examine the role of policy narratives. Policy narratives have been identified by other policy scholars from an interpretive standpoint (e.g., Stone 1989; Fischer and Forester 1993; Roe 1994) as being highly influential in the development of public policy. By combining the empirical methodologies of various policy process research agendas and the recognition of the importance of policy narratives, the narrative policy framework (NPF) (McBeth et al. 2005; Jones and McBeth 2010; and Shanahan et al. 2013) fills an important niche in the body of policy process theories by explicitly and empirically examining the policy narratives used by actors in the policy process.