Power Through Narratives: Animal Welfare Lawmaking in Finland

Power is a central concern in public policy research, yet its operation within legislative processes remains empirically challenging to trace. This paper addresses this challenge by demonstrating how the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) can be used to empirically analyze multiple forms of power in legislative policymaking, through a case study of the reform of Finland’s Animal Welfare Act (693/2023). The case is analytically revealing because policy preferences are constructed through contested human narratives while the key objects of regulation lack political voice. This setting makes visible how narratives do not merely justify legislative choices, but structure what is debated, what is excluded from consideration, and how animal life is governed through law. The paper demonstrates how the NPF enables a systematic empirical analysis of Lukes’s multidimensional conception of power in legislative policymaking, while extending its application to the study of Foucauldian biopower. The analysis examines how policy narratives: (1) legitimize concrete legislative decisions (decision-making power), (2) delimit the scope of legislative debate (agenda-setting power), (3) shape perceptions of necessity and desirability within policymaking (preference-shaping power), and (4) constitute animal life as governable populations (biopower). Through this integrated theoretical approach, the study specifies how different dimensions of power operate simultaneously and become institutionalized through law. Empirically, the study analyzes a broad set of legislative and policy documents produced during Finland’s over a decade-long reform process. The analysis identifies two competing policy narratives. An industry-oriented narrative framed Finland as an already high-welfare country and constructed animal welfare reform primarily as a matter of safeguarding the economic viability and competitiveness of domestic animal production. An animal rights–oriented narrative, by contrast, emphasized animals’ intrinsic value and the moral and legal importance of enabling species-specific behavior. The findings suggest that the industry-oriented narrative was dominant across the reform process. Legislative decisions were repeatedly justified through this narrative, it shaped agenda-setting by contributing to the exclusion of fur farming from the scope of the reform, and it structured policy preferences by treating the continued viability of animal production as a taken-for-granted requirement for legislative reform. Institutionally, these narrative dynamics were reflected in long transition periods and exception clauses that preserved existing production practices. From a biopolitical perspective, the analysis shows how animals were differentially constructed as governable populations, with the most substantial regulatory improvements directed toward companion animals, where reforms did not fundamentally challenge dominant industry-oriented regulatory logics. By demonstrating how the Narrative Policy Framework can be used to empirically analyze multiple forms of power, including biopower, this study contributes to policy process research by showing how policy narratives mediate between policy ideas and legislative outcomes, shaping how power is exercised and institutionalized in law.