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What does a structured narrative consist of? The first section of the chapter considers this question and how its answer contributes to understanding and explaining policy dynamics. Section two is the major section of the chapter and examines methods for the microanalysis of the policy dynamics in a structured narrative. The final section investigates what makes a structured narrative convincing or valid, successful or true. These three sections allow the chapter to act both as a methodological guide for the empirical chapters that follow and as a conclusion to the preceding theoretical chapters.
allows policy to be used as a heuristic to facilitate empirical enquiry, rather than conceived of as a natural category for investigation. In these terms, the successive states of policy traced through time, a policy path, becomes the basic structure of the narrative; as discussed in Chapter 1, this is the starting point of dynamic policy analysis. Further, this is a non-essentialist ontological claim, which has implications for the microanalysis of policy narratives that are considered in the next section of the chapter.
The second proposition is that policy is a meso-level concept and policy history is somewhere between the macro-scale, such as with accounts of structural changes in the political economy or constitutional change, and particular studies of precise events in deep historical detail, such as the agreement of a particular budget package. This has several important corollaries for the structure of the narrative and its microanalysis. First, historical contingency becomes a guiding theme; at any given juncture there are multiple outcomes that might have occurred. A sense of possibility is essential to any narrative of policy dynamics. The meso-level of analysis is fine-grained and so recognizes the role of agency in influencing the course of development in particular historical contexts and demands analysis of the multiplicity of causes that are at work in any temporal setting. In addition, at the meso-level there are discernible structures, processes and constraints that exist across time and recur in various historical settings; and these play a causal role in the direction and pace of change. Therefore an important part of policy narratives is the identification of these structures and the tracing of the ways in which they constrain and motivate individuals in particular settings, leading to outcomes that can be explained as the contingent results of conjunctural moments. As Pierson (2005, p. 41) sets out:
In part because studies of policy enactment make it possible to examine moments of change in fine detail, the role of particular actors in initiating such movements is likely to be highlighted. Yet these studies have greater difficulty in identifying those features that facilitate, impede or channel entrepreneurial activity. Broad, structural features, as well as long, slow-moving processes, which may be crucial preconditions for policy change, recede from view.
Policy narratives embrace the complexity of different processes of different speeds and at different levels coexisting in the policy path; indeed, it is the aim of the narrative to weave these together into a coherent story. Crucially for explanation by narratives, it is only by virtue of hindsight and the analysis of the conjunction of different processes that we can make any sense of which process is dominant, which structures and constraints may have been operating and the direction of their net effect. A structured policy narrative should specify the institutions, structures and processes that are embodied in a given historical setting; identify the possibilities and constraints that these structures
create for agents within those settings; and construct explanations of outcomes that link the causal properties of those structures to the processes of development that are found in the historical record.
A policy path encompasses a series of steps in the development of policy that are explained individually: there will be different explanations for different steps in the sequence as there is no single causal mechanism to encompass the whole policy narrative, nor is there a teleology or historicist cause from which all else can be traced. These steps may be moments, events, processes, periods, choices that are observed more generally, or are a typical kind for which we might employ portable concepts, models or metaphors;
alternatively these may be salient events – these are not necessarily ‘large’ or immediately recognizable, but are capable of being labelled in retrospect as critical junctures in the development of a policy.
Pierson (2004) stresses that causes have their effects over different temporal scales; just as the historian is counselled by the Mao Tse Tung view that the twentieth century was too early to tell about the effects of the French revolution. It is only by virtue of hindsight that one can judge salience;
additionally, different events acquire salience over time – that is, our judgement of salience is itself temporally distinct. The judgement of salience relies on questions of potentiality and contingency: if possibilities are foreclosed by a decision or action, or when the costs of reversing a decision or action are high, this is a condition for salience. However it is not sufficient, as there must be a supporting judgement that the decision or action had significant or meaningful consequences in terms of policy development.
Unlike closed systems studied in theoretical models based on the ambition for covering law explanations, policy processes sit in an open context. This is what makes theories of the policy process so difficult: they are irreducibly complex. This is a common predicament for professional historians; the crossing of many causal paths drives events. Many of the steps in a structured narrative occur at the nexus of contending forces. John Bury (quoted in Oakeshott 1966, p. 201) argued that this confluence of paths was not governed by laws and stressed the idea of contingency in historical analysis: ‘it was the conflux of coincidence that proved decisive’.
In terms of narrative as a form of explanation, the key for any narrative is to avoid being a Just Sostory. Such stories refer to Kipling’s answer to how the leopard got its spots and the rhino its wrinkled skin; because of the fanciful natural history in these stories, the term came to be used in evolutionary biology to refer to unnecessarily elaborate and speculative evolutionary explanations that lacked any substantial empirical support. The term has come to be used in the social sciences in the same way. In historical narratives, theoretical models are used but they are local or contextual, and sometimes limited to one specific, temporally distinct event within the narrative. Theory
is always subordinate to evidence. The burden of the narrative is to weigh competing models, concepts or metaphors and show that one is the most appropriate in view of the evidence. In discussing how to judge one narrative explanation as being better than any other, the answer always refers back to the evidence. In ‘just so’ stories, by contrast, the evidence is subordinate to the theory. There is a willingness to extrapolate basic models across whole areas with limited evidential support. Applied rational choice theory has a tendency to produce ‘just so’ stories; Green and Shapiro (1994) note the poor empirical support for such a widely used theory; and Elster (2000) argues that the Bates et al. (1998) project for ‘analytical narratives’, aka rational choice history, amounts to a series of ‘just so’ stories.
‘Just so’ stories are not usually Kiplingesque in their absurdity; and indeed almost all are the result of a genuine attempt to avoid ‘ad hoc-ness’ in historical narratives. For example, Goldstone (1998, p. 832) warns against ‘Dr Seuss-like explanatory principles’, such as logic which suggests that events are wholly contingent and unique and so just happened to happen this way and are not very likely to happen that way again. The ambition to avoid the imputation of ad hoc-ness is worthy but in the context of complex policy systems it can lead to a reliance on general theories that can only ever be idealistic, which approximate only for equilibrium conditions rather than how and why equilibrium is reached, and for which empirical support is not general but rather limited to particular cases. This book argues that ‘just so’ stories are the inevitable result of adopting the covering law view of explanation as the basis for analysing complex and heterogenous policy dynamics.
For example, in a well-cited article Büthe (2002, p. 487) proposes that structuring a narrative based on a model can allow scholars to treat them as data on which to test the model of a general theory:
Beyond the elements identified in the model, however, additional context-specific information should be minimised. Information that is extraneous to the model should be provided only insofar as it affects salient elements and is needed either to understand the relationship between these elements or to appreciate the contingencies of a particular historical process.
In these terms, the model defines what is important in the narrative and thus avoids the problem of ad hoc-ness that inductive narrative explanations, from a social science perspective, may suffer from. However, the evidence that suits the testing of the model is selected, which raises the possibility that the model is true or correct in terms of confirming evidence, but inadequate in terms of understanding or making sense of the overall phenomenon. In John Godfrey Saxe’s fable of the six blind men confronting an elephant and touching different parts of the animal, each of their different models was correct and confirmed by the evidence from touching the elephant: an elephant was like a
wall, a sharp spear, a huge fan, a giant snake, an old rope and an extremely large cow. However, none of these models was remotely adequate for characterizing an elephant.
From a dynamics point of view, the contextual elements of the narrative are essential for making sense of the development of a complex, composite variable over time. The thick, historical description, the emphasis on conjunctural contingencies and strategic agency are the core elements of a narrative; this is what needs to be made sense of rather than being stripped out in the interests of ‘lean’ modelling. Büthe (2002) is encouraging the analyst to make the overall evidence subordinate to the theory (as expressed in the model). We reject here the notion that narratives should be conceived as
‘testing’ the model, on the grounds that to do so would inevitably render the narrative a ‘just so’ story where features of the world that are essential and causal in this context are ignored because they do not have, nor could they have, a place in the general model because of the irreducible complexity that characterizes policy processes.
In place of the goal of assisting the discovery-governing regularities by testing models of general theories, the function of the narrative in policy studies is to provide understanding and explanation of particular dynamics of policy development. Because of contingency and the importance of possibility in policy dynamics, there is no way to tell the trajectory or path of a policy except by following it step by step. There is no covering law to be unveiled here. When the contingent causal factors at one step are understood, then we cannot call upon a dynamic rule to deduce what happens next; no such rule (or theory or model) exists. Many causal factors pull and tug in different directions in a historical process, and the policy analyst must compound them in order to understand the process (it is not possible to strip them away into component parts or use the ceteris paribus method). Complex systems textbooks show the vast intellectual effort necessary to compound causes in a theoretical model to deduce the progress of relatively simple systems; this reveals the hopelessness of models aggregating micro-causes in complex and heterogeneous policy systems.