Introduction

Stories are important. Every new piece of legislation, every piece of policy advice or guidance, is a narrative in its own right, which links together beliefs, actions and institutions in a distinctive manner (Bevir and Rhodes, 2006: 4). However, policy analysis is dominated by ‘decisionism’ (Majone, 1989: 19). The emphasis is on finding technical fixes to policy puzzles, with the task of social scientists defined in terms of the generation and utilisation of ‘evidence’. This chapter asks whether policy analysis pays enough attention to the role of policy narratives, which deal with ‘why’ as well as ‘how’ questions.

‘Evidence-based policy making’ has become the dominant paradigm (Davies et al, 2000). However, policymakers quip cynically that ‘policy-based evidence-making’ is more common, with what counts as ‘evidence’ being manipulated to fit predetermined policy preferences. Some feel that the search for neutral evidence is misplaced anyhow, arguing that policy making should be explicitly a value-led process. At a workshop for policymakers at our university, one participant argued that ‘We don't want evidence-based policy making. We want political policy-making’, and another put in a plea for ‘stories not spreadsheets’. Paying more attention to the role of storytelling and narrative can be a way of putting the politics back in to policy making, and blowing the cover on claims for value-free evidence. It offers new forms of discovery for policymakers, and new opportunities for social scientists to support better policy making. A well-connected US political scientist, reflecting on his experience of engaging with policymakers, recently remarked to me that ‘They don't want our research findings, they want a model of the mind’. Supporting policymakers in decisionmaking can be as much to do with cognitive mapping as with the supply of detailed data. Exploring actual and potential policy narratives provides an opportunity to map and re-map the connections between actors, ideas and institutions. Narratives offer a way to ‘stabilise … assumptions about political dilemmas and come to conclusions about what to do’; they can be defined as a ‘chronological account that helps actors to make sense of and argue about policy issues (Boswell, J., 2013a: 621–2).