Theories of the policy process should have concepts and propositions that are relatively clear and internally consistent (Sabatier, 1999). The concept of social construction within the broader framework of the Social Construction and Policy Design (Schneider and Ingram, 1993) is not clear or consistent. It has dozens of definitions and operationalizations leading to limitations of empirical testing and scientific progress. One way forward is to apply the characters of heroes, villains and victims from the Narrative Policy Framework (Jones and McBeth, 2010) with their clear and consistently applied definitions to operationalize social construction. To test this proposition, this research uses data gathered from a survey of the US general public in 2015 about climate change. It asked respondents (n=259) to characterize policy actors and identify their relative influence on the politics of the issue. Utilizing heroes and victims as positively constructed and villains as negatively constructed in combination with influence it plots 10 policy actors along a 2X2 model including: advantaged, contenders, dependent and deviants. It finds that there are differences in the social construction and influence of actors based on the perception of the problem, and that no policy actors are identified as deviants. This empirical test provides support for the proposition that narrative characters are a clear and consistent approach for operationalizing social construction within the Social Construction and Policy Design.
