Michael D. Jones

University of Tennessee at Knoxville | UTK · Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy

The Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) has become instrumental in understanding how policy narratives impact public policy processes. This article presents a systematic analysis of the historical development of NPF research, drawing on a review of 189 NPF articles to investigate its evolution. The findings are presented across five temporal stages, e...

This paper re‐evaluates conventional Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) scholarship which has traditionally prioritized the study of specific rules configurations and their role in forming effective institutional arrangements. We suggest that effective institutional governance may actually be more reliant on the narrative foundations and...

Central to the growing policy debate surrounding climate change is the role of fossil fuels in the energy sector. Chief among these issues is the role of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” which has drawn controversy for its negative externalities while also allowing the extraction of a new range of oil and gas reserves. This research applies the...

An edited collection of the latest research in the Narrative Policy Framework. Open access book.

The National School Lunch Program (NSLP) is the second largest nutrition assistance program in the United States, subsidizing school day meals for nearly 30 million U.S. children, including over 287,000 in Oregon as of fiscal year 2019. A policy success story to some, the NSLP is not without critics or controversy. As discussions about childhood he...

Policy Studies Journal (PSJ) is the flagship journal of the American Political Science Association (APSA) Public Policy Section. This status report is to be shared with those interested in policy research and the journal. This report gives everyone a chance to see how the journal is progressing. We hope you find it useful and informative.

In June 2018, President Trump directed the development of a sixth branch of the US Armed Forces—the Space Force—whose primary mission is to enhance the space operations of the USA and its allies. In this paper, we utilize the Narrative Policy b Framework (NPF) to examine legislative meso-level narratives surrounding the advocacy for and in oppositi...

The last decade has seen the rise of the narrative policy framework (NPF) as a valuable theoretical framework for advancing knowledge of the policy process. In this article, we investigate the NPF's "travel" capacities across geographies, political systems, policy fields, levels of analysis, methodological approaches, and other theories of the poli...

The last decade has seen the rise of the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) as a valuable theoretical framework for advancing knowledge of the policy process. In this article, we investigate the NPF’s “travel” capacities across geogra- phies, political systems, policy fields, levels of analysis, methodological approaches, and other theories of the po...

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...

Numerous published efforts have compared and contrasted policy process theories. Few assessments, however, have examined the extent to which they are inclusive or diverse. Here we summarise lessons from previous assessments, paying attention to how Paul Sabatier’s science based criteria have shaped the contours of the field. In looking at these con...

The current issue's articles span three central themes in public policy research: the role of internal and external cues in policy diffusion processes, the importance of representation in the success of collaborative governance and the public's experience with service delivery, and the impact of direct political participation on policy outcomes. We...

Introduction There is plenty of science, philosophy, and literature pointing to the importance of narrative in human affairs. One way to understand the findings and arguments presented is that people, by nature, are inclined to impose meaning on the world and that when they do, they rely on information shortcuts (heuristics) to develop quick and ea...

This chapter discusses how public policy is navigated by a system of actors that are vying for their preferred policy goals and wield narratives to help achieve those goals. It analyzes the intuitive ad hoc nature of policy narration by drawing upon extant narrative research in public policy to offer theoretically based and useful storytelling advi...

Marine conservation initiatives are implemented by a variety of programs and projects, and can utilize a suite of tools to offset human impacts on marine environments. Insufficient funding has been identified as a factor hindering their ability to achieve conservation goals. However, there is limited research investigating why and how marine conser...

Rural studies and policy process literature are ripe for integration due to their interdisciplinary approaches, empirical‐foci, and importance of values, norms, and heuristics. Policy process theory often ignores the important context‐rich variation within the rural and urban distinction, yet offers qualities rural scholars may find useful, like ge...

The spread of COVID-19 – a currently incurable, highly contagious, and potentially lethal virus – has presented the world with unprecedented challenges. Spanning virtually every policy domain, these challenges seem to spare no one, affecting individuals, families, communities, and all types of organizations, public or private. Moreover, many of the...

Welcome to PSJ’s second issue of 2020. We hope that you are all healthy, safe, and finding ways to thrive in what has so far proven to be a tumultuous and difficult year. Despite the exponential spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) and the resultant tragedies befalling our communities, we here at the PSJ have been fortunate to be able to m...

Despite the range of analytical foci in current policy process theory, the idea of an empirically sound power concept has not received much attention. While scientifically oriented process frameworks tend to be either implicitly or explicitly based on a pluralist understanding of power, critical theory focused approaches frequently point to power i...

Narratives are the primary way by which people both understand themselves and how they communicate with others. The Narrative Policy Framework (NPF), a framework intended to help researchers make sense of the policy process, empirically studies the capacity for narratives to shape public policy at multiple levels of analyses. After what has now bee...

The purpose of this study is to test whether groups with different cultural cognition orientations construct different stories about the same policy issue given the same information. We employed a focus group methodology to assemble participants with similar cultural dispositions and used the Narrative Policy Framework to examine the policy narrati...

The purpose of this study is to test whether groups with different cultural cognition orientations construct different stories about the same policy issue given the same information. We employed a focus group methodology to assemble participants with similar cultural dispositions and use the Narrative Policy Framework to examine the policy narrativ...

The article “The stories groups tell, campaign finance reform and the narrative networks of cultural cognition”, written by “Aaron Smith-Walter, Michael D. Jones, Elizabeth A. Shanahan, Holly Peterson“.

In this chapter we argue that the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) provides comparative public policy scholars valid categories that can address Sartori’s dilemma, as the NPF’s concepts are optimal for “traveling” across different contexts. We lay the foundation for this argument by first describing the components of the NPF. We then explore two re...

This essay reviews the policy‐oriented literature on economic inequality in wealthy countries published from 2008 to 2018. We focus on this decade because it is a period bookended by both the beginnings of the Great Recession of 2008–2009 as well as the recovery. During this timeframe, attention to inequality by social policy scholars grew substant...

This case study details a qualitative application of the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) with the aim of providing guidance and insight on how to conduct qualitative NPF studies. Our case study focuses on Oregon Measure 97 in the United States, a contentious citizen-initiated ballot measure in the 2016 Oregon General Election. We leverage the NPF’...

This essay reviews the policy-oriented literature on economic inequality in wealthy countries published from 2008 to 2018. We focus on this decade because it is a period bookended by both the beginnings of the Great Recession of 2008–2009 as well as the recovery. During this timeframe, attention to inequality by social policy scholars grew substant...

Despite the range of analytical foci in current policy process theory the idea of an empirically sound power concept has not received much attention. While process-oriented frameworks tend to be either implicitly or explicitly based on a pluralist understanding of power, substance-focused approaches frequently point to power inequality in the polic...

en Oregon Ballot Measure 97 was a contentious measure on the Oregon 2016 ballot that sought to raise taxes on corporations with sales over 25 million dollars within the state of Oregon. Predictably, there was a considerable amount of lobbying targeting elites and expansive campaigns targeting the public intending to promote or block the measure. Th...

Recent growth in unconventional oil and gas development is controversial, fueling an ongoing U.S. policy debate. Central to these discussions is hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” a well‐stimulation technique that has become synonymous with unconventional oil and gas extraction methods. This research applies the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) t...

en Inspired by postmodernism and the seemingly contradictory charter of science, the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) was named in a 2010 issue of the Policy Studies Journal for the purposes of understanding the role of narrative in the policy process. Since its inception we have seen a proliferation of research applications. In this issue of the P...

The focus of this study is to understand policy elites' distinctive cognitive patterns of policy narratives, a rarely explored area of research within the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) scholarship. In particular, we investigate how and why local policy elites selectively perceive and retrieve certain elements of various competing narratives (e.g...

Narrative has been observed to be central to the policy process - constituting public policy instruments, persuading decision makers and the public, and shaping all stages of the policy process. This article distils useful policy advice, which can be employed by scholars and practitioners alike. We call attention to two potential communication pitf...

Objective: We use the variation in public support for campaign finance reform (CFR) to determine factors important to collective policy preference formation. Methods: Using a national survey, we factor analyze the latent dimensions of various reforms, and rely on an experimental design to explain the role policy narratives, cultural theory (CT), a...

Objectives Cultural theory (CT) is often leveraged to explain policy preferences and risk perceptions. While scholars often make claims regarding CT's relationship with political process preferences, these remain largely untested. This study explores the relationship between CT and individual preferences toward the process in which political decisi...

The Narrative Policy Framework has a growing number of researchers seeking to apply the framework in policy process scholarship. This article is intended to assist those interested in conducting an NPF study that is 'clear enough to be wrong' (Sabatier, 2000). While graduate programs offer critical methodological training, this article focuses on t...

The core goal of the science communicator is to convey accurate scientific information—to help people update existing understandings of the world and to change those understandings when necessary. However, science communicators, with their often extensive scientific training and educations, are often socialized into educating with information deriv...

Studying social narratives is not part of mainstream political science, but, as Shaul Shenhav argues in Analyzing Social Narratives, it ought to be. Narratives are everywhere and are an important factor in human and social life; human beings are essentially homo narrans, and so social science must take narratives seriously. Narratology is just one...

Recent growth in unconventional oil and gas development is controversial, fueling an ongoing U.S. policy debate. Central to these discussions is hydraulic fracturing, or 'fracking', a well-stimulation technique that has become synonymous with unconventional oil and gas extraction methods. This research applies Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) to ex...

A team of faculty and graduate researchers from the Department of Political Science and the Public Policy Ph.D. program at the University of Arkansas and the School of Public Policy at Oregon State University conducted an anonymous Internet survey designed to gauge local policymakers’ and business leaders’ opinions, attitudes, and preferences towar...

A team of faculty and graduate researchers from the School of Public Policy at Oregon State University and the Department of Political Science and the Public Policy Ph.D. program at the University of Arkansas conducted an anonymous Internet survey designed to gauge local policymakers’ and business leaders’ opinions, attitudes, and preferences towar...

To better understand how the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) is applied, this article catalogues and analyzes 161 applications of the ACF from 2007 to 2014. Building on a previous review of 80 applications of the ACF (1987–2006) conducted by Weible, Sabatier, and McQueen in 2009, this review examines both the breadth and depth of the framework....

This article examines the role of evidence in the National Rifle Association and the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence's firearm policy debate proximate to the December 14, 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting. The groups’ member‐directed policy narratives are operationalized with The Narrative Policy Framework (NPF), and new categories of evidence...

Since early writers like Walter Lippman (1922) wrote about elite influence over public attention to policy issues, researchers have attempted to better understand the challenges present in setting policy agendas. The development of this literature has been truly interdisciplinary, finding traction in many academic disciplines, including communicati...

A team of faculty and graduate researchers from the Department of Political Science and the Public Policy Ph.D. program at the University of Arkansas and the School of Public Policy at Oregon State University conducted an anonymous Internet survey designed to gauge local policymakers’ and business leaders’ opinions, attitudes, and preferences towar...

A team of faculty and graduate researchers from the School of Public Policy at Oregon State University and the Department of Political Science and the Public Policy Ph.D. program at the University of Arkansas conducted an anonymous Internet survey designed to gauge local policymakers’ and business leaders’ opinions, attitudes, and preferences towar...

In 2010, the narrative policy framework was introduced as “a quantitative, structuralist, and positivist approach to the study of policy narratives” (Jones and McBeth, 2010: 330). Deviating from this central tenet of the narrative policy framework, in this article we show that the framework is quite compatible with qualitative methods—and the vario...

We operationalize the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) and cultural cognition to examine the policy narratives groups form about campaign finance when allowed to develop stories in a focus group environment composed of individuals with similar cultural predispositions. Our analyses indicate that the stories the groups tell matter as individuals rea...

Recent critiques of the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) have described the framework as a hybrid – and perhaps contradictory – platform using postpositivist theory in the service of positivistic methods. While the NPF has done much to advance what one might term its positivist hypotheses-testing orientation, the ongoing relationship between the NP...

This study uses content analysis of recent Multiple Streams Approach (MSA) research to determine the scope of MSA applications, examining the consistency, and coherence with which concepts of MSA are applied. Our analysis examines peer-reviewed articles testing MSA concepts available in English published from 2000 through 2013 (N = 311). Among othe...

While John Kingdon's Multiple Streams Approach (MSA) remains a key reference point in the public policy literature, few have attempted to assess MSA holistically. To assess its broader impact and trends in usage, we combine in-depth analysis of representative studies, with comprehensive coverage of MSA-inspired articles, to categorize its impact. W...

Objective: Although campaign finance is a growing concern, pollsters rarely ask the public about reform. We use the variation in public support for campaign finance reform to determine factors important to collective policy preference formation. Methods: Using a national survey, we factor analyze the latent dimensions of various reforms, and rely...

The Science of Stories: Applications of the Narrative Policy Framework in Policy Analysis is the first comprehensive collection of Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) studies, a new framework that empirically examines the role of policy narratives in the policy process. The core theme of NPF, and hence the book, is that policy narratives shape policy...

You will stir up little controversy by asserting that human beings are storytelling animals. We all have at least a rough accounting of what a story is. Stories progress from beginnings, through middles, and have endings. They are composed of characters. There is a plot situating the story and characters in time and space, where events interact wit...

The narrative policy framework (NPF) asks a simple empirical question: What is the role of policy narratives in the policy process? As a framework, different disciplinary theories (e.g., from literature, political science, psychology, anthropology, and communications) are used to inform and shape NPF research to answer such a basic question. As wit...

Narratives have a dual function that both reflects and shapes who we are. Representing both the communicative and transformative nature of narrative, storytellers spin their tales as both fundamental expressions of individual and group identities and expressions of values (McAdams 2004). For example, love stories such as Romeo and Juliet, Odysseus...

The study of narratives in a variety of disciplines has grown in recent years as a method of better explaining underlying concepts in their respective fields. Through the use of Narrative Policy Framework (NPF), political scientists can analyze the role narrative plays in political discourse. © Michael D. Jones, Elizabeth A. Shanahan, and Mark K. M...

Postpositive policy scholarship has long asserted the importance of narratives—or stories—in shaping public policy through public opinion. In part, the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) was developed to empirically test this assertion. To assess the relationship between policy narratives and public opinion, NPF posits several causal mechanisms inclu...

In 2006, Adam J. Berinsky and Donald R. Kinder published findings in the Journal of Politics that demonstrated that framing news as a story influences how individuals cognitively organize concepts and information. The study presented here moves forward in this tradition. This research combines samples obtained in the springs of 2009 and 2010 while...

Objective This research examines how narrative communication structures influence the public's perceptions of risk and policy preferences related to climate change. Methods An Internet-based experiment is used to expose roughly 1,500 census-balanced U.S. respondents to climate change information. Four experimental treatments are operationalized: a...

One of the leading theories for understanding the policy process is the theory of social construction and policy design developed by Anne Schneider and Helen Ingram. The theory incorporates the social construction and power of target populations to understand the development and implications of policy design. In order to better understand its empir...

The recent tragedy in Newtown Connecticut has refocused attention on the contentious area of gun control policy in the United States. The chilling image of an armed gunman proceeding methodically through the corridors of Sandy Hook Elementary School has prompted radically different policy solutions to emerge. The National Rifle Association calls fo...

Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) is a new and maturing theory of the policy process that takes a systematic, scientific approach to understanding the social construction of policy realities. As such, NPF serves as a bridge between postpositivists, who assert that public policymaking is contextualized through narratives and social construction, and...

Objective: Social scientists from a variety of disciplines have employed concepts drawn from cultural theory (CT) to explain preferences across an array of issues. Recent research has challenged key elements of CT in a number of ways, perhaps most importantly by arguing that cultural types are simply another formulation of political ideology, and t...

Do political television advertisements influence congressional election results? We test a hypothesis that candidates increase their vote share by increasing their advertisement airings relative to their opponent's airings (i.e., “mind the gap”). Using aggregate advertising data over three election cycles, we employ a two-stage least squares estima...

Climate change is easily one of the most contentious policy problems facing the United States. A majority of climate scientists agree that the earth has warmed over the last 100 years and that human-made greenhouse gasses are the cause (e.g., Doran and Zimmerman 2009; IPCC 2007; Oreskes 2004, but also see Bray 2010), yet a nontrivial portion of the...