Risk‐Based Policy Narratives

The Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) was developed to provide theoretical and empirical grounding for inquiries into questions about the interplay between communication and policy processes. In our previous work, we argued for the inclusion of framing analysis within the broader NPF structure in order to account for the ways in which problems, solutions, and characters are portrayed to citizens. The study presented here seeks to further develop these complementary approaches to understanding the construction of policy narratives in the important domain of hazards and disaster policy. Communication of risk is central to political and policy dialogue. By accurately and effectively communicating risks, the problem definitions and associated solutions may be more closely aligned with expert risk assessments, actors may mobilize to affect change, and policy change may be more likely. We examine the construction of risk within narratives to analyze how the narrative construction of chronic versus urgent risk may influence policy discussions. In this paper, we link NPF concepts of setting, plot, and moral of the story to frames of risk. This study advances NPF scholarship by linking these theoretical approaches and establishing how framing analysis can aid in measuring narrative concepts.