Government messaging about COVID-19 vaccination in Canada and Australia: a Narrative Policy Framework study

Background: Storytelling and narratives are critical components to public policy and have been central to public policy communicators throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Aim: This study applied the Narrative Policy Framework to compare and contrast the policy narratives of the Canadian and Australian Prime Ministers regarding COVID-19 vaccination. Methods: Official media releases, transcripts and speeches published on the websites of Prime Minister Morrison and Prime Minister Trudeau between 31 August 2020 and 10 September 2021 relating to COVID-19 vaccines were thematically analysed according to the Narrative Policy Framework. Results: The policy narratives of Scott Morrison and Justin Trudeau tended towards describing both governments as heroes for securing and rolling out vaccines. Trudeau tended to focus on the villain of COVID-19 while Morrison regularly described other countries as victims of COVID-19 to position Australia as superior in its decision-making. These findings also demonstrate how narratives shifted over time due to changing COVID-19 case numbers, emergence of rare complications associated with the AstraZeneca vaccine and as new information arose. Conclusion: These findings offer lessons for COVID-19 times as well as future pandemics and disease outbreaks by providing insight into how policy narratives influenced policy processes in both Australia and Canada.

The Story and the Data

Creative economies are touted as engines for economic prosperity and social good in cities. The wide applicability and inclusive definition of what counts in creative economies means that conceptual definitions are not universal. Studies on the promise of the creative economy have emerged, however, analyses of these reports and their policy value are scarce. We explore five creative economy reports, applying the Narrative Policy Framework, a novel analytic lens for comparing policy documents according to “setting,” “characters,” “plot,” and “moral of the.” Key contributions of this research center the ways that reports use rhetorical devices and empirical data to support claims and recommendations, forwarding policy learning and adaptation as tools for building and sustaining creative city branding.

Agreement and Trust: in Narratives or Narrators?

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.

Sanctuary Cities, Focusing Events, and the Solidarity Shift: A Standard Measurement of the Prevalence of Victims for the Narrative Policy Framework

Numerous 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.

Stepping Forward: Towards a More Systematic NPF with Automation

Advancements 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.

A Narrative Policy Framework Solution to Understanding Climate Change Framing Research

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.

Speaking from Experience: Medicaid Consumers as Policy Storytellers

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.

Discourse Network Analysis of Nuclear Narratives

This 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 and the impact of 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.

Narratives in power and policy design: the case of border management and external migration controls in Italy

This article explores the relationship between policy narratives and the design of the Italian border management and external migration control regime in the last two decades. First, drawing from the theory of social construction and policy design and through a qualitative application of the Narrative Policy Framework, the article traces the evolution of narratives developed by key actors in government. Second, it investigates the design of the Italian externalization policy. Empirical material is drawn from government documents and decision-makers’ parliamentary interventions, press conferences, speeches, newspaper interviews and op-eds. The evidence shows that the dominant narratives have remained constant over time. Humanitarian rhetoric has been mobilized to justify and legitimize the implementation of security measures through bilateral agreements signed with African countries. The implications of such a design are relevant in that it poses serious concerns in terms of respect for migrants’ human rights. Overall, the article offers new insights into the empirical investigation of policy narratives and sheds light on the role of narratives in the social construction of migration policy design.