Applying the Narrative Policy Framework by Using Discourse Network Analysis. Insights from the Struggle Over Agricultural Pollutants

The narrative policy framework (NPF) has been increasingly applied to study the policy process and the impact of policy narratives on policy change. At the meso level, the NPF enables us to explain how narratives shape the composition of actor coalitions within policy subsystems and what strategies these coalitions use in order to influence policy outcomes. The framework shares the idea of the advocacy coalition framework (ACF) that actor coalitions form based on shared policy core beliefs. Its main contribution is the idea that other policy elements, such as characters or plots, represent strategically constructed stories used by these coalitions to influence the scope of conflict and attain certain preferred policy outcomes. The NPF exhibits a strong relational component. First, the formation of actor coalitions depends on the relation between actors and their shared beliefs. Second, the combination and relation between different narrative elements structure the narratives these actors use. Therefore, using network analysis when applying the NPF seems promising. Although a few studies have already applied some sort of network analysis to the study of policy narratives, applications of discourse network analysis are still lacking. In this paper, I argue that discourse network analysis is a fruitful method for applying the NPF on the meso level. Discourse network analysis has been used to analyze policy debates or political discourses (see, e.g., Leifeld 2017). Coding the relation between actors and contents (or concepts or elements) these actors refer to enables retrieving network data that entails information on the relations between actors as well as the relations between contents. Applying this method to the study of policy narratives will be especially helpful in uncovering the structural elements within the NPF. The main aim of this paper is to show how discourse network analysis can be used when applying the NPF to the study of policy processes. A first conceptual part of the paper will be complemented by an operationalization and an empirical application on the role of policy narratives in the struggle over agricultural pollution, for instance by pesticides or nitrate.