Policy Narratives as Rhetorical Bridges: Theory and Application to Social Policy

• In Event: Rhetoric and Narrative in Policymaking

Abstract

This paper explores a distinctive capacity of policy narratives – namely, their potential to serve as rhetorical bridges across disparate and often contending areas of discourse, both narrative and non-narrative. Drawing broadly from the literatures of literary criticism, philosophical pragmatism, legal theory, political psychology and behavioural economics as well as the burgeoning literature on policy narratives per se, I identify and elaborate upon the distinguishing qualities and characteristics of the narrative form, and of policy narratives in particular – their peculiar emotive power, their polymorphic potential and their causal spine – that suit them to this bridging function.
This conceptual framework will then be applied to a qualitative analysis of cases in social policy in Europe and North America in different welfare-state eras, from establishment, through retrenchment to redesign. It will examine the use of “epics” and “anecdotes” in bridging from paradigms of expert policy analysis to popular cultural motifs, and will investigate several hypotheses regarding the factors affecting the choice of these respective narrative forms. For example, the suitability of the “epic” and the “anecdote” as forms of policy narrative depends upon the relative complexity of the policy design. The epic is an especially powerful form, with the potential to present a policy as a collective project that resonates with what Rogers Smith has termed ethically-constitutive “stories of peoplehood.” The more complex the policy design, however, the less likely it is to lend itself to an epic story of accomplishment, and the more likely it is to lend itself to anecdotes that can embody particular aspects of the design and simplify complex proposals by focusing on their impact in individual cases, The power of anecdotes, however, will depend of the type, degree and reach of empathy they invoke. The paper will conclude by sketching out the further research agenda suggested by these preliminary findings, including the question of whether particular narrative types are characteristic of different eras of political development.

Author

• Carolyn Hughes Tuohy, University of Toronto