The narrative policy framework in the context of a nondemocratic regime: an analysis of landscapes fires policy debates in Russia

The research aims to enrich the understanding of the applicability of the Narrative Policy Framework in the context of nondemocratic regimes. The study examines the narrative strategies (angel-devil shift, scope of conflict, and causal mechanisms), which were used by different policy actors in public discussion of landscapes fires in Russia. The policy narratives of two coalitions (government and NGO) over the period 2019-2020 were explored. Previous studies in the Russian context address a situation when the government promotes reforms, and nongovernmental actors take an opposing position. On the contrary, in this case NGOs promote reforms, while the government rather tries to save the status quo. 110 narratives from three main governmental actors and one NGO were analyzed by manual coding. Analysis fully confirmed the previous findings regarding the tendency of authoritarian government to use strong angel shift (nearly +1). The authoritarian government could tend to show themselves as effective policymakers to increase legitimacy, and angel shift seems to be an appropriate narrative strategy for this purpose. NGOs did not use a clear angel shift nor a clear devil shift strategy, thus the difference between the government and NGOs coalition was not very high (although statistically significant). It is inconsistent with previous findings and could be explained by the fact that in this case NGOs try to promote reforms, so while criticizing the government, they still proposes solutions and talks about itself as a hero who takes actions to improve the situation. The results for the scope of the conflict strategy are more complicated. The distribution of costs and benefits of existing (provided by the government) and proposed (by NGOs) policies were estimated separately. The finding shows that the government doesn't demonstrate any prominent containment or expansion conflict strategy. NGOs use a strategy of expanding the conflict by discussing the existing policies and has some tendency to contain conflict when discussing proposed policies, but not very prominent. Exploring causal mechanisms has shown that when speaking about the causes of fire itself (ignition) narrators use the same causal mechanism (intentional or inadvertent), but it is because they both blame the citizens. An analysis of the discussion of the causes of fires on a large scale shows a different picture. Here the government behaves like a winning coalition - it seeks to either not talk about the causes or attribute them to accidental mechanisms, such as the weather. While NGOs show a narrative strategy typical for a losing coalition and directly blames the government. The research adds new data about the peculiarities of the use of policy narratives in the Russian authoritarian context.