Narrative Politics in Public Policy:

Legalizing Cannabis 1st ed. Edition

Hugh T. Miller
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/narrative-politics-in-public-policy-legalizing-cannabis-
1st-ed-edition-hugh-t-miller/
Narrative Politics in
Public Policy
Legalizing Cannabis

Hugh T. Miller
Narrative Politics in Public Policy
 Hugh T. Miller

Narrative Politics
in Public Policy
Legalizing Cannabis
Hugh T. Miller
School of Public Administration
Florida Atlantic University
Boca Raton, FL, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-45319-0 ISBN 978-3-030-45320-6 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45320-6

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Acknowledgments

My home university, Florida Atlantic University, supports research and

scholarship in many important ways, and I am particularly grateful for
the Fall 2017 sabbatical that launched this book project. I also want to
acknowledge the valuable support from Kristen Walden for help with
literature searches, indexing, and spreadsheet analysis. In addition,
the support and encouragement of Sharyn Dreyer, Albena Dzhurova,
Veronica Elias, Roy Heidelberg, Ryan Lofaro, and Gary Russ is much
appreciated. Ashley Kilroy, Executive Director of Denver’s Department
of Excise and Licenses, provided me an inside look at Denver’s collabo-
rative management process, an experience for which I am grateful. Along
with Ms. Kilroy, Mark Bolton, Legal Counsel, Colorado Governor’s
Office, Michael Hartman, Executive Director, Colorado Department
of Revenue, and Ali Maffey, Policy and Communication Supervisor,
Prevention Division, Colorado Department of Public Health partici-
pated in a valuable and informative panel session at the 2018 conference
of the American Society for Public Administration, which took place in
Denver that year. I am grateful for the skilled professionalism of Nicholas
Barclay, senior editor at Palgrave Macmillan, who ushered the book
manuscript through the review and editorial process. Prabhu Elangali,
Uma Vinesh, Ulrike Stricker-Komba, and Karthika Purushothaman
were instrumental in project management and the publication process.
I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful
comments, in particular Reviewer 2 who provided extraordinarily con-
structive criticism and helpful feedback. Finally, I want to acknowledge

v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

the early help from an individual with expert background regarding the
breeding of cannabis strains before I knew for sure where this book was
heading; same for the help from another individual for providing me
with an industry perspective on regulatory compliance.
 Contents

1 Dubiety 1
1 Facts, Goals, and Narratives 2
2 Cannabis Policy Discourse 3
3 All Words Lie 4
4 Weaponizing Dubiety 7
4.1 Electoral Dubiety 8
5 Political Pluralism 9
References 12

2 Narrative as Meaning-Unit 15
1 Narrative and Its Component Parts 15
1.1 Ideographs 17
1.2 Groups and Narratives 20
1.3 Meaning Contextualized 22
2 Situating the Narrative Politics Model 24
References 29

3 Narrative Subscription 33
1 Narrative Subscription as Identification 34
2 Context 40
3 Emotional Investment 42
4 Summary: Dynamics of Identification 43
References 45

vii
viii CONTENTS

4 Narrative Evolution in Cannabis Policy Discourse 49

1 Evolution in Public Policy 50
2 Narrative Evolution in Cannabis Policy Discourse 52
2.1 Ascendant Narratives 55
2.1.1 Social Justice Narrative 55
2.1.2 Libertarian Narrative 56
2.1.3 Compassionate Use 58
3 Competition and Adaptation 59
3.1 Abstinence Fades; Compassionate Use Ascends 59
3.1.1 Concern for Children in the Abstinence
Narrative 64
3.2 Nativism Becomes Passé as the Social Justice
Narrative Emphasizes Race 65
4 Evolution of Symbolic Associations 69
4.1 Curatorial Considerations 70
5 Attitudes Change 71
References 73

5 Implementation 81
1 Enactment: Legalization by Direct Democracy 83
1.1 Implementation Delays 85
2 Continued Contestation Over Effects of Legalization 86
2.1 Psychosis 87
2.2 “Big Marijuana” 88
3 Regulatory and Managerial Narratives 89
4 Stories Regulators Tell 90
4.1 Matters of Concern to Cannabis Regulators 92
4.1.1 Compliance 92
4.1.2 Consumption Locations 93
4.1.3 Public Education and Research 94
4.1.4 Youth 94
4.1.5 Expenditures 95
4.1.6 Social Equity 95
4.1.7 Impaired Driving 96
4.2 Administrative Discretion 96
References 97
 CONTENTS ix

6 Post-implementation Critical Narratives 101

1 Post-implementation Narratives 103
1.1 Futility 103
1.2 Conspiracy Narratives 106
1.2.1 Market Conspiracies 106
1.2.2 Political Enemies 106
1.2.3 Drug War Enforcement Complex 107
2 Cannabis Scheduling 108
2.1 Rational Calibration and Precision Measurement 109
2.2 Restraints on the DEA 111
3 Political Contestation 113
4 The Ideography of Prohibited Pleasures 114
References 116

7 Assessing the Narrative Politics Model 121

1 Science and Relativism 122
1.1 Relativism and Objective Truth 123
1.1.1 The Hawthorne Effect in Science 123
1.1.2 Relativism, Perspectivism, and Pluralism 125
1.1.3 The Enduring Power of the Science Narrative 132
1.2 Enlightenment Redux 133
2 Concluding Reflections on the Narrative Politics Model 134
References 137

References 141

Index 163
 List of Tables

Chapter 4
Table 1 Evolving and competing narratives in cannabis policy
discourse 54

Chapter 6
Table 1 Post-implementation narratives 104

xi
 CHAPTER 1

Dubiety

Abstract The human condition is marked by multiple sources of

ambiguity and uncertainty. A typical reaction to the resultant anxiety is
to impose order through the use of narratives. However, different nar-
ratives order things differently. In public policy discourse, different
narratives betray not only different goals and aspirations, but also cite
different facts and interpret the same facts differently. Hence the job of
narrative inquiry is to parse the competing narratives to understand the
substantive contest over aspirations and facts.

Keywords Public policy discourse · Ambiguity · Uncertainty · Facts ·

Goals

In this book I explicate a Narrative Politics model of public policy dis-

course. This model is designed to emphasize the political nature of nar-
rative competition for dominance in a public policy discourse. Narratives
are generated by humans trying to impose order on an uncertain and
ambiguous world. The constitutive features of a narrative include the
connotative ideograph and a story line that gathers symbolic mate-
rial into a more or less coherent policy message. The Narrative Politics
model aims to understand the political dynamics of policy discourse by
paying close attention to the contestable narratives within a bounded
policy domain.

© The Author(s) 2020 1

H. T. Miller, Narrative Politics in Public Policy,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45320-6_1
2 H. T. MILLER

Narratives are not self-evident, easily visible objects available for

all to effortlessly ascertain. They require an interpreter of sorts, an
extradiegetic curator who can sort through and interpret the meaning
and substance of multiple narratives—despite the impossibility of get-
ting it right in any permanent sense. Claisse and Delvenne (2017) used
the term extradiegetic to indicate an outer perspective, as when com-
paring policy narratives from a distance. Narratives are dynamic in that
they adapt, evolve, lose support, or gain new subscribers. Narratives
are attempts to mitigate dubiety, but any resultant ordering of reality is
apt to come into conflict with other ways of ordering reality. Dubiety
necessitates a narrative approach that can parse the varying perspectives.

1  Facts, Goals, and Narratives

Early in the growth of narrative policy inquiry, Kaplan (1986) saw a jus-
tification for a narrative approach under conditions where criteria, goals,
and objectives cannot be clearly articulated or agreed upon. I would
add facts to this mix of things that are often problematic. Establishing
facts is important in public policy analysis—even if pursued as an aspira-
tional ambition rather than a completely achievable accomplishment. If
facts exist as some dictionaries say they do, as indisputable truth, nar-
rative policy analysis likely would not be worth spending a lot of time
on. A singular, indisputable narrative would dominate; pluralistic com-
petition among narratives would be pointless; politics would be inert.
Contestation over goals, facts, or both is the rule and not the exception
in formulating public policy in a pluralistic democracy. And this is where
narrative inquiry offers advantages.
Scientific norms of inquiry have the most prestige in establishing fac-
ticity, but the actual research methods deployed to establish the facts
vary considerably among scientific disciplines, and within each discipline
as well. There is no single scientific method, as in the scientific method.
Mainstream, modern social science embraces quantification, neutrality,
and objectivity—an approach variously described as naturalism, positiv-
ism, or scientism depending on one’s assessment of it. My own comfort
level with scientific norms leads me to trust the findings about climate
change, greenhouse gas emissions and many other questions that have
entered the political realm. Sometimes facts can be established as effec-
tively true, or at least as persuasive and convincing among members of
a convention-sharing community. However, Poovey (1998) notes that
 1 DUBIETY 3

the modern fact severs the connection between description and inter-
pretation, and she demurs because this assumption does not withstand
scrutiny. There are no theory-free facts, value-free-facts, politics-free
facts, language-free facts, or culture-free facts. There are no narrative-free
facts. Metze and Dodge (2016) show how facts diverge among policy
discourse coalitions. There is a playing field of competing interpretations,
uncertainties, doubts, and irresolutions that one must accept once one
acknowledges that fact’s status as objective descriptor of indisputable
truth is aspirational at best. This predicament does not gesture toward
nihilism or cynicism, but instead signals a need to study policy narratives
with a focus on their meanings.
The term dubiety refers to the ambiguity we language-using humans
must negotiate in fending off one dang thing after another. The core
concern is the problem of meaning-making. The difficulty seems pro-
nounced in the age of rapid information technology, including tradi-
tional modes of communication such as television and radio, but also
the high-velocity modes of communication such as the Internet, social
media, and smart phones. Dubiety is not exclusive to high-tech commu-
nication media nor to postindustrial anxiety, though it obviously thrives
there. With respect to the Internet, Warraich (2018) complains that
“Dr. Google” has given terrible advice regarding the side effects of stat-
ins, vaccines, and alternative cancer therapies. For medical research, the
dubiety goes deeper than Internet searches. “False positives and exag-
gerated results in peer-reviewed scientific studies have reached epidemic
proportions in recent years. The problem is rampant in economics, the
social sciences and even the natural sciences, but it is particularly egre-
gious in biomedicine. Many studies that claim some drug or treatment is
beneficial have turned out not to be true” (Ioannidis 2011).

2  Cannabis Policy Discourse

In the chapters of this book, I focus on claims made in public policy dis-
course, with most illustrations coming from policy-related discussions of
cannabis in the United States. The discourse on cannabis policy in the
United States is replete with claims based on different interpretations of
the facts, different facts altogether, different concerns and different aspi-
rations. The cannabis discourse was characterized for many years by the
near-prohibition of scientific research on the effects of cannabis. The
claims made for and against this plant are sometimes dubious, and some
4 H. T. MILLER

have a long history. Cannabis policy discourse, the main exhibit room
for the Narrative Politics model I am about to lay out, was chosen espe-
cially for its evolving nature, and for the diversity of perspectives engaged
in political contestation. Public opinion has moved rapidly with respect
to this policy concern, at least in recent years. Some policy narratives
remain remarkably durable while other ebb, flow, recede, and ascend.
Some narratives dominate in certain time periods; they lose that domina-
tion in other time periods; new narratives emerge. Previously dismissed
narratives regain coherence and meaning, coming to pose challenges to
decohering dominant narratives.
Other features of the cannabis policy discourse that make it attractive
as an exemplar for the Narrative Politics model have to do with the curi-
ous structure of status quo policy in the United States. Medical cannabis
is illegal at the federal level but legal in most of the states. And states
vary among themselves in terms of the legal status of adult-use, recrea-
tional cannabis and the punishments prescribed for possessing it; some
have decriminalized possession of small quantities and others continue to
impose long prison sentences. Including Washington, DC, there are 51
different polities at the state level, plus a broad national polity at the fed-
eral level. The exhibit room for this book is necessarily limited to the dis-
course in the United States, though Canada, Uruguay, and other nations
with diverse polities are witnessing rapid change in cannabis policy.
Even when devoid of ideological dogma, scientific studies of the
medicinal, psychological, and behavioral consequences of this plant vary
widely in their conclusions. Psychological effects can range from relax-
ation and happy euphoria, on one end of the pole, to panic, paranoia
and psychosis on the other. Dubiety and ambiguity prevail in multiple
dimensions of the discourse.

3   All Words Lie

I intend for the Narrative Politics model to have potential application
beyond cannabis policy and beyond the United States. In all domains
of public policy discourse there are echo chambers, self-referential bub-
bles, and fragmentation, serving to unmoor policy consensus among the
polity. When prominent liars, bullshitters, or idea marketers deliberately
weaponize uncertainty and ambiguity to distract and misrepresent, the
problem becomes more pronounced. Postings of deepfake videos on the
Internet are but one manifestation of this phenomenon (Rini 2019).
 1 DUBIETY 5

Dubiety undermines aspirations for goal consensus and goal clarity.

For public policy implementation, clear and stable goals would be desira-
ble for those public administrators whose job it is to implement the stat-
utes and directives. But scholars also realize this desired condition is a
bit of a pipe dream. Ambiguity is a way of life in the world of policy
implementation. The problem is not merely that legislative bodies some-
times leave goals vague in order to win majority support for a bill, or
that opponents of the legislation continue to be opposed to the policy
even after enactment. Without a common agreement on goals and facts
in a policy domain, the idea of a sustained, broad consensus may be out
of the question. If there were such a consensus in any given moment,
it would not survive if people change their minds, or if a previously
excluded faction weighs in at the next political moment.
Beyond our inherited capacity for empathy (de Waal 2009), human
sociality benefits from a distinct aptitude for symbolic communication.
Humans have an unequalled talent for abstraction. We categorize and
sort; we use metaphors. Linguistic talents are useful in telling stories and
for philosophizing. Such talents also generate an unavoidable tendency
toward hypostatization—to misconstrue our word constructs as some-
thing akin to a concrete reality. Hypostatization infers that abstractions
of language are assigned reality status. Humans make things of mere
concepts. Humans also exaggerate and lie, which is inherent in language
(Eco 1976). For Eco, a sign is anything that can be substituted for some
other thing. This “other thing” does not have to be present, and does
not even have to exist at the moment a sign stands in for it. “Thus semi-
otics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in
order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot
be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used ‘to tell’ at all” (Eco
1976, 7, italics in original). Hence, all words have the potential to lie;
the unicorn has company.
And humans imitate (Tarde 1903). The capacity to imitate is a large
part of how we learn language as children. More than that, humans
imitate fashion to the point of trendiness. Humans repost Twitter and
Facebook messages in a ritual of replication. Vacationing humans go to
Disney parks in Southern California, Florida, France, and Japan and have
their pictures taken with the same replicated Mickey Mouse, who is able
to appear in multiple tourist destinations simultaneously. Micky, mean-
while, is not actually a mouse—there is almost zero denotative content
linking Micky Mouse with a real mouse. Again, what I am suggesting in
6 H. T. MILLER

this chapter is that symbolic expression entails negotiating with an inexo-

rable and multifaceted dubiety. Fact checkers (e.g. Kessler 2018) do not
necessarily long for the nostalgic olden days when everyone shared the
same standards, and truth could be agreed upon. Nonetheless, factic-
ity depends on shared standards and some minimally consensual under-
standing of reality before facts become acknowledged as such (Poovey
1998). Such mutuality has monistic, totalitarian, and hegemonic ten-
dencies, but in those conditions, members of the community seemingly
transcend dubiety to assess truth claims in common. They can agree on
the facts. Does abortion cause cancer, as volunteers at the local abor-
tion counseling clinic say? (Tarico 2018). Is it really the case that there
are no medical benefits to cannabis, as the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration (DEA) asserts? Divergent claims circulate in public policy
discourse; policy experts as well as ordinary citizens must navigate among
them.
Operating under the radar of a broad, shared culture where there is
tacit agreement on general norms and conventions, there is a plurality of
robust, self-contained communities, the borders of which are attentively
monitored by their leaders and gatekeepers. The effect of increased frag-
mentation is to reduce dubiety within groups, but between groups and
among groups the ambiguity and uncertainty worsen. The legitimation
of otherness and difference follows from the expiration of the totalizing
consensus associated with the modern fact. Previously stable meanings
are now in play. Otherized groups, those who embody difference, claim
quite reasonably that the now-discredited Western consensus was but the
imploring of white, propertied, patriarchal, privileged classes. Other, dif-
ferent ways of being have gained credibility, perhaps in part because of
past suppression by those canonically arrogant perspectives. As Jameson
(1991) put it: “The stupendous proliferation of social codes today into
professional and disciplinary jargons (but also into the badges of affir-
mation of ethnic, gender, race, religious, and class-factional adhesion) is
also a political phenomenon, as the problem of micropolitics sufficiently
demonstrates” (p. 17). Fragmentation is readily observable in the prolif-
eration of scholarly journals and the accelerating pace of new academic
specializations. Groups in the larger society scarcely communicate across
sub-cultural boundaries, except for the purpose of casting aspersions
(Jamieson and Cappella 2008). The prospects for abstractions such as a
collective will, the public interest, or even shared policy goals seem as
likely as putting Humpty Dumpty back together again.
 1 DUBIETY 7

4  Weaponizing Dubiety
In addition to raising anxiety levels, dubiety makes it easier to divert
attention from collective problem solving altogether. Any sustained
focus on poverty and inequality, suspect electoral practices such as ger-
rymandering, climate change, rationales for war, inflation-adjusted wage
decline, disproportionate incarceration rates—all these are trumped by
an infinite sequence of unconnected images that pander to pervasive
doubts. Lakoff (2004) has been pondering this sort of political phenom-
enon for years and applying it to public policy topics such as tax relief
as proposed by Republicans. “Think of the framing for relief. For there
to be relief there must be an affliction… When the work tax is added
to relief, the result is a metaphor: Taxation is an affliction” (pp. 3–4).
The term tax relief then is replicated in the news media, and soon
Democrats start using the term. “The conservatives had set a trap: The
words draw you into their worldview” (p. 4). This sort of manipulation
of political metaphors is more than a disingenuous practice; like market-
ing and advertising, it is part of an industry. Campaign advisers, political
consultants, think tanks, journalists, and advertisement content creators
are paid to tip the scale one way or another in the struggle for meaning
capture. Against this backdrop, it is difficult to be sanguine about the
prospects of rational policy discourse, leading to a collective will focused
on the public interest, leading to optimal solutions to public problems.
The most challenging burden for policy analysts is not necessarily to pro-
pose technical-rational, managerial solutions to consensually validated
problem definitions or policy proposals, but to find ways of clarifying the
political contestations that accompany democratic pluralism.
Since 2014 in the post-Citizens United era where nonprofit organ-
izations—whose donors are secret—participate in political discourse, it
becomes ever more problematic to figure out who is talking. The idea
that a corporation, nonprofit or for-profit, can have “free speech” rights
is a bit disconcerting, but the notion has a long history in the United
States. Following the 1837 Supreme Court case Charles River Bridge
v. Proprietors of Warren Bridge, a monopoly company was granted legal
status like that of an individual citizen. Charles River Bridge was a cor-
poration that was considered by the court to be a “person” and the
legal precedent was set (though the company lost the case). Writing for
the majority, Justice Roger B. Taney argued, “We think it is well set-
tled that by the law of comity among nations, a corporation created by
8 H. T. MILLER

one sovereignty is permitted to make contracts in another, and to sue

in its courts, and that the same law of comity prevails among the sev-
eral sovereignties of this Union” (Janosik 1987, p. 69). The corporate
right of free speech was extended to electoral ballot questions in 1978 in
First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti. Thus, spokespersons (corporate
mouth pieces) who repeat corporate claims are allowed equal standing to
citizens in the public discourse. The oddity of this is compounded by the
fact that a corporation is the property of its shareholders, adding a new
wrinkle to the meaning of property rights.

4.1   Electoral Dubiety

Citizens understandably doubt whether a politician’s campaign prom-
ises are sincere. That old doubt has become vastly more complex in
recent years. If electoral campaigns are always in question, the ques-
tions are coming in at a higher velocity thanks to artificial intelligence
and advanced information technology. The 2016 American presiden-
tial campaign saw the introduction of Russian bots—pre-programmed,
computerized units of commentary designed to misinform, generate
hostility, and to initiate protest demonstrations. According to Clifton
(2017), “The day Donald Trump was elected president, nearly 2,000
Twitter accounts that had pumped out pro-Trump messages in the
run-up to the vote suddenly went dark. Then, in spring 2017, these
bot-controlled accounts reemerged to campaign en français for Marine
Le Pen in the French election, and then once again this fall, to tweet
auf Deutsch on behalf of the far-right party in Germany’s election.”
Twitter and other social media can misinform public opinion using bots.
Ferrara et al. (2016) write that nobody knows how many bots circulate
in social media, and detecting them is not necessarily an easy task, but
there is some technological help. For example, the detection algorithm
Bot or Not? relies upon highly predictive features of social media mes-
sages to detect suspicious behaviors in an effort to distinguish bots from
humans (101). Gorodnichenko et al. (2018) summed up their research
as follows:

Not surprising, bots were used during the two campaigns we study to
energize voters and, according to our simple calculations, bots could
marginally contribute to the outcomes of the Brexit and the 2016 U.S.
Presidential Election…. [C]herishing diversity does not mean that one
 1 DUBIETY 9

should allow dumping lies and manipulations to the extent that the public
cannot make a well-informed decision. Where one should draw the line
(e.g., improve media literacy, introduce “code of practice” for social net-
works) is a central question for the society. (21)

According to Shane and Frenkel (2018), “The Russian influence cam-

paign on social media in the 2016 election made an extraordinary effort
to target African-Americans, used an array of tactics to try to suppress
turnout among Democratic voters and unleashed a blizzard of posts
on Instagram that rivaled or exceeded its Facebook operations, accord-
ing to a report produced for the Senate Intelligence Committee.” Bots
mix social media and artificial intelligence to disrupt and misinform—at
least some of the time. But malicious intent is not a necessary ingredi-
ent to call into question one’s sense of reality. Artificial intelligence in
the form of auto-pilot airline control systems failed spectacularly in the
case of Indonesian Lion Air Flight 610, a Boing 737 MAX 8 aircraft
that crashed back in October 2018. Intended to reduce human error
and relieve pilots of some of the drudge work, the pilots apparently had
difficulty gaining back control of the airplane from the auto-pilot sys-
tem, as if HAL from 2001 Space Odyssey returned from the movies and
entered the planet’s air space to disastrous effect—killing all 189 people
on board. The scenario was repeated in March 2019 with the crash of
Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, killing all 157 people on board. Human
creations, be they bots in the public discourse or self-driving automobiles
and airplanes, may well make life better most of the time, but meanwhile
humans take one more step away from direct interaction with reality.

5   Political Pluralism

When political conflict is at a minimum, dubiety seems less pronounced.
But fissures in Western culture’s supposedly consensual narrative were
revealed in the late 1800s by Nietzsche’s perspectivism (e.g. Thus
Spake Zarathusta; Beyond Good and Evil; Human, All Too Human),
and since then the monistic consensus has been further undermined
by existentialists, phenomenologists, pragmatists, semioticians, post-
structuralists, deconstructionists, hermeneuticists, social constructivists,
Wittgenstein, and Kuhn. Lyotard (1984) memorably expressed a post-
modern “incredulity toward metanarratives” (xxiv). What has become
increasingly apparent is the profound absence of a monistic, universal
10 H. T. MILLER

truth that transcends groups, cultures, and societies—no Objective

Truth. There are local conventions and practices, as Wittgenstein
pointed out, and there are paradigm shifts in knowledge-building pro-
jects, as Kuhn argued. Dubiety reveals itself even in physics, the hardest
of hard sciences, where quantum phenomena have everyone scratching
their heads about the underlying ontology. The Heisenberg uncertainty
principle presented a measurement paradox when it became evident
that both position and velocity cannot be measured simultaneously. In
politics, perspectival relativity is apparent whenever a policy proposal is
debated. The facts of the matter and the varying aspirations of the actors
are relative to the varying perspectives of those involved. The stable
anchors are not there—but they never were. Stable meanings are made of
consensus, not reality itself, as social constructivists have long been say-
ing (Berger and Luckmann 1967). Immanuel Kant’s noumenal world is
untethered to language; culture, on the other hand, is stabilized by its
own constructs. However, in a pluralistic democracy reasonable people
can differ. In the Narrative Politics approach to narrative inquiry, varying
contexts, groups, moral influences, and customs are manifest in the dif-
ferent facts, different values, and different symbolizations that constitute
the array of different policy narratives competing in any policy domain or
policy discourse.
Contestation and doubt—not only about the other side’s argument—
are welcome aspects of normal politics. The day to rue is the day when
neither are allowed. As Spicer (2019) advises, government officials
“should understand and appreciate better, rather than decry, the real
world practices of political contestation that are present in the commu-
nities and societies in which they live and work.” In public policy dis-
course there is a lot to contest. Among reliable sources of information,
peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific journals set the gold standard for
authenticity but even these manuscripts are contestable—perhaps that
helps explain why they are the gold standard. Newspapers and magazines
with high journalistic standards publicly contest assertions, claims, and
perspectives. Postings on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and other social
media are justifiably more suspect. Whom to trust and under what cir-
cumstances is an age-old concern, even if its technological manifestations
are new on the scene. In narrative politics, one subscribes to the most
resonant and trustworthy narratives, and as we shall see in Chapter 3
subscriptions can be cancelled.
 1 DUBIETY 11

The ordering of the chapters in this book imprecisely follows the

career of a policy narrative. The political psychology of identifying with
and subscribing to a policy narrative will be considered in Chapter 3,
where affect, values, group identification, and echo-chamber effects are
considered. Also in Chapter 3, I will portray the policy narrative as the
glue that holds a coalition together. Chapter 4 on narrative evolution
highlights a policy narrative’s struggle for political survival in a policy
discourse constituted by competing narratives that use different facts,
seek different purposes, and deploy different symbolizations. There are
certain linguistic strategies and nuances that help these narratives com-
pete in a dynamic process that is ever-changing. Chapter 4 thus prof-
fers an evolutionary theory that demonstrates how a narrative, treated
as a meaning-unit, can evolve, adapt, and survive—and, quite possibly,
eventually yield terrain to other, more coherently robust narratives, or
to narratives that are better adapted to the local political environment.
The enactment and implementation stages in the career of a successful
policy narrative are investigated in Chapter 5. Here we find that, among
the early states, legalization of cannabis typically takes place via ballot
initiative. The winning legalization narrative must then interact with
competing “how to” narratives, some of which are more helpful to its
aspirations than others. Implementation of a policy narrative enacted
in the form of a statute, an executive order, or a successful ballot initi-
ative is a momentous occasion in the career of that narrative, but not
the end of its career. Its facts, values, and meanings become institution-
alized, normalized, and conventional, but this does not imply fixity or
permanence. For example, prohibition of alcohol in the United States
was overturned in 1933 after 12 years of dry folly. And even though the
DEA still repeats a claim from its original narrative (that is, the genesis
narrative) that there are no medical uses for cannabis, it has of late done
very little to disrupt the state-regulated medical cannabis industry in
the United States. In Chapter 6, I will contemplate the durability of an
agency’s genesis narrative in the long run. In the case of cannabis, there
has been a slow retreat of the war-on-drugs policy narrative, but that is
due to the specifics of the cannabis issue and to Congressional influence
and intervention. For other Schedule 1 drugs, the war-on-drugs narra-
tive retains its dominance well into its institutionalization in an agency.
A genesis narrative links an enacted policy narrative to implementation
and then institutionalization, legitimizing the establishment of a public
12 H. T. MILLER

administrative agency.1 Is the genesis narrative thereby stabilized, as

Hajer (1995) surmised? Are the original intentions buried in bureau-
cratic dysfunction, as goal-displacement theory (Merton 1957) would
have it? Or does the original mission maintain its allure, as Goodsell
(2011) postulates? Negligence or continued resonance are potentially
consequential to the long-term fate of the genesis narrative.
The Narrative Politics model cannot eliminate dubiety; its purpose is
to facilitate a policy scholar’s ability to hear different sides—but not nec-
essarily in service to some wiser, better, or more neutral metanarrative
that Roe (1994) envisioned. My own disposition is to share Lyotard’s
(1984, xxiv) skepticism regarding metanarratives, which he understood
to be legitimation strategies for hegemonic discourses. Narratives are
human attempts to impose order on dubiety, not only for policy pur-
poses but also for the sake of anxiety relief. There can be a dominant
narrative in the discourse that is not a hegemonic metanarrative. When
goals are contested and facts are disputed, a focus on policy narratives
can reveal the substance of the different political perspectives that lie
beneath the overt disagreement. The Narrative Politics model offers an
interpretive, inductive approach to navigating the political swampland of
public policy discourse. The curatorial function in this model is to dis-
cern coherence within what sounds at first like a cacophony. The result
is not a metanarrative but another narrative, one that redescribes and
recontextualizes through juxtaposition and reinterpretation. In the next
chapter, I seek to situate the Narrative Politics model within the narrative
policy inquiry literature.

References
Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. 1967. The Social Construction of
Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Doubleday.
Claisse, Frédéric, and Pierre Delvenne. 2017. As Above, so Below? Narrative
Salience and Side Effects of National Innovation Systems. Critical Policy
Studies 11 (3): 255–271.

1 Specifying the genesis narrative may not, in practice, be as clear-cut as I am making it

seem. There are revisions to an act that obviate some aspects of the genesis narrative. But
implementation of a genesis narrative, even with temporal ambiguities, functions as a crit-
ical starting point for assessing institutionalization of a policy narrative, its staying power,
and the adaptations endured (or enhanced) at the hands of implementers.
 1 DUBIETY 13

Clifton, Denise. 2017. Twitter Bots Distorted the 2016 Election—Including

Many Likely from Russia. Mother Jones, Oct 12. https://www.motherjones.
com/politics/2017/10/twitter-bots-distorted-the-2016-election-including-
many-controlled-by-russia/. Accessed 15 Dec 2018.
de Waal, Frans. 2009. The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society.
New York: Three Rivers Press.
Eco, Umberto. 1976. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Ferrara, Emilio, Onur Varol, Claytin Davis, Filippo Menczer, and Alessandro
Flammini. 2016. The Rise of Social Bots. Communications of the ACM 59
(7): 96–104.
Goodsell, Charles T. 2011. Mission Mystique: Belief Systems in Public Agencies.
Washington, DC: CQ Press.
Gorodnichenko, Yuriy, Tho Pham, and Oleksandr Talavera. 2018. Social Media,
Sentiment and Public Opinions: Evidence from #Brexit and #USElection.
NBER Working Paper. https://rahwebdav.swan.ac.uk/repec/pdf/WP2018-
01.pdf. Accessed 15 Dec.
Hajer, Maarten A. 1995. The Politics of Environmental Discourse: Ecological
Modernization and the Policy Process. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Ioannidis, John P.A. 2011. An Epidemic of False Claims. Scientific American,
June 1. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/an-epidemic-of-false-
claims/. Accessed 30 Dec 2019.
Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Jamieson, Kathleen Hall, and Joseph N. Cappella. 2008. Echo Chamber: Rush
Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Janosik, Robert J. 1987. Encyclopedia of the American Judicial System: Studies of
the Principal Institutions and Processes of Law. New York: Scribner’s.
Kaplan, Thomas J. 1986. The Narrative Structure of Policy Analysis. Journal of
Policy Analysis and Management 5 (4): 761–778.
Kessler, Glenn. 2018. Meet the Bottomless Pinocchio, a New Rating for a False
Claim Repeated Over and Over Again. Washington Post, Dec 12. https://
www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/12/10/meet-bottomless-pi-
nocchio-new-rating-false-claim-repeated-over-over-again/?utm_term=.4f-
ba6544e76e. Accessed 12 Dec 2018.
Lakoff, George. 2004. Don’t Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and
Frame the Debate. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing.
Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on
Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Merton, Robert K. 1957. Social Theory and Social Structure. Glencoe, IL: Free
Press.
14 H. T. MILLER

Metze, Tamara, and Jennifer Dodge. 2016. Dynamic Discourse Coalitions

on Hydro-Fracking in Europe and the United States. Environmental
Communication 10 (3): 365–379.
Poovey, Mary. 1998. A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the
Sciences of Wealth and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rini, Regina. 2019. Deepfakes Are Coming. We Can No Longer Believe
What We See. New York Times, June 10. https://www.nytimes.
com/2019/06/10/opinion/deepfake-pelosi-video.html?action=click&mod-
ule=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage. Accessed 12 June 2019.
Roe, Emery. 1994. Narrative Policy Analysis: Theory and Practice. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Shane, Scott, and Sheera Frenkel. 2018. Russian 2016 Influence Operation
Targeted African-Americans. New York Times, Dec 17. https://www.nytimes.
com/2018/12/17/us/politics/russia-2016-influence-campaign.html?ac-
tion=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage. Accessed 17 Dec
2017.
Spicer, Michael W. 2019. Towards the Meridian: Albert Camus, Democracy, and
Public Administration. Public Integrity 21 (4): 378–393. http://doi.org/10.
1080/10999922.2018.1522181. Accessed 17 Dec 2018.
Tarde, Gabriel. 1903. The Laws of Imitation, trans. Elsie Clews Parsons. New
York: Henry Holt and Company.
Tarico, Valerie. 2018. You’ve Been Hacked: The Psychology of Disinformation
and How to Protect Yourself. Alternet. https://www.alternet.org/
youve-been-hacked-psychology-disinformation-and-how-protect-yourself.
Accessed 11 Dec 2018.
Warraich, Haider. 2018. Dr. Google Is a Liar. New York Times, Dec 16. https://
www.nytimes.com/2018/12/16/opinion/statin-side-effects-cancer.html.
Accessed 17 Dec 2018.
 CHAPTER 2

Narrative as Meaning-Unit

Abstract In the Narrative Politics model, a policy narrative is constituted

by signs and story lines. A powerful, symbol-laden, c­onnotation-rich
sign is called an ideograph. Ideographs are capable of bringing symboli-
cally-charged, emotionally-charged, and morally-charged imagery into a
narrative—and hence bring resonance to narratives as well. This approach
to policy narratives differs somewhat from those that draw on literary
­categories for their structuration.

Keywords Narrative politics model · Ideograph · Semiology ·

Policy narrative structuration · Symbolic connotation

1  Narrative and Its Component Parts

Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics was actually
written by his students and colleagues and published three years after
his death in 1913. He was among the scholars who appreciated that
human understanding of reality depends on words and language, as
these generate the concepts we deploy. His insight that words point to
concepts or images of objects, rather than to the objects themselves,
helped to stimulate the structuralist intellectual movement, and has also
influenced poststructural and postmodern thought in that the capac-
ity of signs to denote reality is problematized. Sign is composed of two
parts, the signifier and the signified (de Saussure 1983; Barthes 1972).

© The Author(s) 2020 15

H. T. Miller, Narrative Politics in Public Policy,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45320-6_2
16 H. T. MILLER

The signifier might be, say, the word baseball, in which case the signified
would be the round, white, seamed, spherical object we are imagining.
Words such as baseball do not refer to material objects; they refer to
mental pictures of those physical objects. We can talk about a baseball
without actually having a baseball in hand. This feature of the signified
is especially important when it comes time to talk about lions, tigers,
or bears. Language only requires the concept of a lion or tiger or bear
or baseball and not its physical presence. There is, then, a gap between
the word and the object. This gap is helpful because I don’t have to be
in the presence of a bear to talk about bears, and I don’t have to carry
around a backpack full of objects I want to talk about that day. A word
points to the concept, not the object, says de Saussure (1983).
Baseball becomes the signifier when the term refers to a game played
with mitts, bats, home plate and bases. In the rules of the game, a
batter gets three strikes before s/he is declared out. Baseball’s
well-known rule, “three strikes and you’re out” became the ideographic
public policy metaphor that aimed to send repeat felons to prison for life
in the United States back in the 1980s. Language allows such jumping
of contexts; metaphors do this on a regular basis. In comparing the
pragmatics of science to narrative knowledge, Lyotard (1984) noted that
science requires one language game, namely denotation, to the exclusion
of all others. The language of policy discourse does not require
denotative precision; language is promiscuous in allowing connotative
suggestion. Barthes’ (1972) famous example involves the rose. The word
“rose” as a signifier evokes an image of a velvety flower. A rose may be
just a rose but gather a dozen red roses into a bouquet, add some baby’s
breath, and passion enters the picture. A dozen roses signifies … some-
thing other than 12 plants. Meanwhile, the signified (rose) becomes a
signifier (passion). Biologists retain denotative power in their language
by naming things using specialized words. The scientific word for rose
is rosa, with local species given names like rosa gallica or rosa arcicularis.
Phrasing the name of the plant in a Latin-sounding way may remove
some of the romance from the rose, but for plant biologists denotative
power is preserved. Policy scholars are not as lucky as biologists in that
connotation is all but omnipresent in public policy discourse. My use
of the term cannabis, another Latin-sounding name, is also an attempt
to preserve as much denotative authority as possible. As we will see in
Chapter 4, naming the plant hemp, hashish, or marijuana was not a
neutral matter; each term had different connotations back in the 1930s
 2 NARRATIVE AS MEANING-UNIT 17

when cannabis was made illegal in the United States. Add to connotation
the difficulty that many useful concepts lack materiality altogether (for
example, public will, ideology, or political attitude). Denotative words
that presumably point to concrete objects can easily be repurposed for
political or poetic effect.

1.1  Ideographs
Ideographs, as connotative-rich signs capable of forming stable images,
can help frame a policy problem, solution, or goal in a strategically
crafted way. They can gather in concepts and ideas as well as imagery,
emotions and values. A policy narrative reinforced with relevant
ideographs can enhance a policy proposal. Welfare queen, for example,
was used to describe a woman on public assistance who nonetheless
lived an extravagant lifestyle. Through connotation, the term tapped
into resentment of people receiving public assistance, and also tapped
into racist imagery, as the woman accused of being a welfare queen was
black. This ideograph was made famous in the 1980s by Ronald Reagan,
and by the 1990s Bill Clinton promoted the End-welfare-as-we-know-it
narrative—and succeeded in dramatically curtailing welfare eligibility in
the United States while adding punitive features (Fording et al. 2008).
In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’ association of Islam with the Trojan
Horse demonstrates how connotation and association function to support
a larger narrative. Hajer’s (1993, 2005) acid rain functions precisely as
an ideograph, contributing meaning to policy narratives that have found
their way into regulatory policy proposals and statutes. Ideographs such
as privatization derive linguistic backing from the neoliberal, free mar-
ket lexicon to warrant proposals to run government more like a business.
Many other sorts of connotative images have been deployed to varying
effect. Death tax, and partial birth abortion are among the successful
ideographs whose resonance enhanced policy narratives in American pub-
lic policy discourse. Reflecting on role archetypes, Smith-Lovin (1990,
239–240) wrote, “Despite widely varying backgrounds, we largely agree
that Mothers are nicer than Mafiosi …”. Indeed, if one intended to reduce
drunken driving, one would expect that more people will subscribe to the
narrative Mothers Against Drunk Driving than Mafiosi Against Drunk
Driving. The ideography of the cannabis user has been somewhat reha-
bilitated in that the user is sometimes imagined to be a medical patient
using the drug for palliative purposes. The Reefer Madness ideography
18 H. T. MILLER

of a cannabis user was the image of a crazed axe-wielding killer. In that

view, users tumble into a lifestyle of murder and insanity that may include
episodes of attempted rape. The image of cannabis users as psychotic and
violent deviants still has traction (Berenson 2019). But even the image
of a stoner lying on the couch for hours is giving way in some localities to
an image of cannabis user as gym rat (Reynolds 2019).
While the Narrative Politics model presupposes the most reducible
meaning-unit to be the sign (following de Saussure 1983), the more
complexly connotative symbolization is the ideograph, an ordering
device I have applied to policy discourse elsewhere (e.g., Miller 2004,
2012). Cannabis the sign denotes a plant, but no cannabis policy
narrative allows cannabis to be merely denotative. There is much
symbolic supplement that prevents straightforward denotation to
prevail over suggestive connotation in cannabis policy discourse. With
its origins in communications theory (McGee 1980), the ideograph
is to be understood as a constellation of signs, associated emotions,
values, and images—a bundle of connotations in other words.
Components of an ideograph are symbolic elements that do more than
gather the signified and the signifier into a minimally meaningful unit.
They are complex signs that evoke understanding, convey emotions,
and affirm values. There is an abundance of potent ideographs that are
bandied about in public policy discourse: acid rain; drug addict; Brexit;
death tax (as opposed to inheritance tax); Euroskeptic; free market;
partial birth abortion; big government. They all have powerful and
suggestive symbolic connotations and have been strategically deployed in
public policy discourse to inform and give meaning to policy narratives.
These include health care narratives, environmental narratives, economic
narratives, poverty narratives, transportation narratives, energy narratives,
and so on. There are several varieties of anti-government narratives, all
of which gather into their story lines symbolic material such as signs
and ideographs. Ideographs in particular provide a political spark to the
narrative; as high-octane signs, they convey significant connotative and
symbolic meaning.
Relatively discrete and particularistic, ideographs are more amenable
to analytical reduction than alternative organizing devices such as
a frame, an aspect, a lens, or a perspective. “An ideograph is an ordi-
nary-language term found in political discourse. It is a high-order
abstraction representing collective commitment to a particular but
equivocal and ill-defined normative goal. It warrants the use of power,
 2 NARRATIVE AS MEANING-UNIT 19

excuses behavior and belief, which might otherwise be perceived as

eccentric or antisocial, and guides behavior and belief into channels
easily recognized by a community as acceptable and laudable” (McGee
1980, 15). Ideographs function in a policy narrative to bring connota-
tions, associations, and imagery into the picture to reflect political com-
mitments in a fulsome way. Ideographs also function to normalize some
view of the world or justify policy action or policy belief. Such normaliz-
ing entails political struggle. Favored ideas are given positive resonance
and opposing ideas are given negative resonance—the function of either
being to warrant the use of power. Lejano and Leong (2012, 801) seem
not to fully appreciate the symbolic power of the toilet-to-tap ideograph
when they depict it as an “unfortunate moniker.” It is more than that.
Toilet-to-tap is a powerfully suggestive ideograph that generates reticence
toward water re-use as public policy. Ideographs are not required to be
rational or factually accurate. Their distinguishing feature is their power-
ful symbolic connotations that are capable of propelling policy narratives
in which they are embedded toward dominance or enactment, or in the
case of water re-use, a policy defeat for environmentalists.
With powers of connotation, ideographs shape perceptions and make
coherent otherwise disjointed emotional and symbolic disorder, espe-
cially when they are threaded together using story lines to create policy
narratives. Ideographs used in a policy narrative can powerfully attract
narrative subscription (Miller 2019; see also Chapter 3). Emotionally and
symbolically powerful narratives, in turn, inform policy proposals and
influence potential legislation. With the help of a story line, the narrative
arranges these ideographs into some satisfying sequence, thereby infusing
coherence into the argument. As the narrative coheres, the facts, goals,
problems, and/or solutions are stabilized within the narrative as it
competes with other narratives in the larger public policy discourse.
Local prejudices, personal anxieties, unexamined associations,
and conflated categories may all surreptitiously register in the policy
discourse. In the cannabis policy discourse, the connotations of the
term marihuana are different from terms such as hemp as we shall see
in Chapter 4. Denotatively they point to the same plant, but each term
brings different connotations into the picture. Elevald (2012) showed
how the phrase “life course based” shifted social security policy away
from market-based values in the Netherlands.
Narrative scholars must be attentive to shifts of meaning when inter-
preting a policy discourse. Even a formal, precisely written policy goal is
20 H. T. MILLER

subject to interpretation (Yanow 1996), but the linguistic complexities

do not end there. As political commitments shift, the once-stable
formal goals can themselves change. Understanding signs and their
meanings is a group effort. We learn words as we grow up and are social-
ized into a community. We come to shared understandings and arrive
at shared meanings with others in our cultural sub-group. Participants
in local groups must learn the practices of the group—a child could be
learning the ways of the family, or a neophyte scientist could be learn-
ing how to interpret what is seen in an electron microscope. The
term group thus gestures toward experienced social life as the ground for
understanding.

1.2   Groups and Narratives

Group identifications matter for Stone (2012). For her, the unit of
analysis in the political community is the group—not the autono-
mous individual. In that sense, policy making is about forming groups
and splitting from groups. They coalesce; and they divide. Politics and
policy can happen only in a community. Groups and social formations
are the building blocks in politics, whereas in the rationality project
(the contrasting opposite to the group-based polity) individuals are the
fundamental unit of analysis. But Stone’s point is that individual prefer-
ences do not just come out of the blue, so to speak. Ideas and actions
are influenced by others. In the Narrative Politics model, the sociological
referent group functions as a stabilizer of values, conventions, and iden-
tification—reinforcing the importance of social life in shaping meaning.
(A referent group is a group toward which on one feels an attachment
due to shared understandings and conventions. A referent group is not to
be confused with a reference group, which is a group that one does not
belong to but that registers as meaningful for comparative purposes.)
That said, the fundamental unit of analysis in the Narrative Politics model
is not the group per se, but the narrative—arguably the most robust
meaning-unit available in public policy discourse.
Narrative politics takes place through the interaction of ideas and
coalitions—which are dynamic rather than fixed. Narratives can evolve
and can adapt to a changing cultural environment, and in turn can
influence changes in that same environment. In some contexts the
group and the narrative may be synonymous. However, ascribing char-
acteristics such as “core beliefs” to groups or advocacy coalitions
 2 NARRATIVE AS MEANING-UNIT 21

requires a bit of hypostatization—of the same sort that occurs when

corporations are afforded rights of free speech. However, one might
argue, groups are constituted by meanings. And indeed, belonging to a
group can in some instances be analogous to subscribing to a narrative.
But a p ­ olicy narrative is a more conspicuously obvious meaning-unit than
a group is; members of groups are not necessarily required to share beliefs
or values. Narratives and groups function differently in politics even in
instances when they are mutually constitutive. Groups are ­ aggregations
of individuals; narratives are meaning-units. It could be that narrative and
group overlap, as they do with advocacy coalitions (Sabatier and Jenkins-
Smith 1993) and discourse coalitions (Hajer 1993). But using the nar-
rative rather than the group as the unit of analysis elides the ­ reification
and hypostatization that happens when ascribing attributes such as beliefs
and values to an entity or to a system. The advocacy coalition model
(Sabatier and Weible 2007) utilizes the concept of core belief, at first
described as “largely the product of childhood socialization” but then
core beliefs quickly come to “span an entire policy subsystem” (194),
and one is not sure if it is the individual, the coalition, or the subsystem in
possession of core beliefs. In any event, the empirical evidence for a belief
appears in the form of a narrative. The Narrative Politics model utilizes the
concept of narrative subscription and avoids the difficulty of belief attribution
because narrative, and not the subsystem, coalition, group or individual, is
the unit of meaning under investigation. In privileging the narrative over the
group as the object of identification, I am opening the possibility that in pub-
lic policy discourse narrative determines the coalition, which does not imply
that members of groups must necessarily share the same meanings. Hajer
(2005) hinted at this possibility in his conceptualization of a discourse coali-
tion—the notion that political coalitions are constituted by their narratives. In
writing about the toilet-to-tap narrative in the water reuse discourse, Lejano
and Leong (2012) similarly pointed out that “that is part of the power of
the narrative analysis — that is, the structure of the coalition, or the notion
that there is an anti-reuse movement at all, derives directly from the narra-
tive itself.” In Stevens’ (2012) study of the “toilet to tap” water recycling
proposal in San Diego, California, the competing coalitions aligned precisely
with the narratives, as if to constitute them. In other words, subscription to
a narrative was apparently synonymous to joining the discourse coalition.
This formulation would extend Hajer’s (2005) discourse coalition a bit
further than he perhaps intended. But it is nonetheless imaginable that
a public policy coalition is organized precisely around a policy narrative.
22 H. T. MILLER

The burden of meaning can then be situated in the narrative rather than
the group.
The narrative as a meaning-unit requires interpretation, not only on
the part of an outside curator but also on the part of a would-be sub-
scriber. This allows group membership to shift even if the narrative lives
on, and also allows the narrative to evolve and to lose, retain or add sub-
scribers. With a coalition as the unit of analysis, it is questionable whether
the concept of core belief still make sense after, say, a ten-year time period
when all of its members have quit or died. It can make sense if the coa-
lition is centered around a narrative that coalition members subscribe to
or unsubscribe from. The coalition itself does not require the fixed mem-
bership that is often attributed to it, or simply presupposed. Reification
and hypostatization occur quite regularly, as we humans are quite adept
at making things out of concepts in order to make them come alive. But
by using narrative rather than group as the unit of analysis, we do not
need to argue that abstractions (such as systems) possess beliefs. Hence
it is ontologically preferable to conceive of coalitions as constituted by
adherents and activists who subscribe to a policy narrative, and with
varying degrees of buy-in.

1.3   Meaning Contextualized

Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (2009) makes the case that
philosophers are not in a position to over-rule local understandings
of truth. This privilege belongs to the practicing scientists—or any
epistemic community—whose practices and conventions lead to justi-
fied belief within their relevant communities. Local social formations
have their own understandings, meanings, practices, and truth standards.
There is no purchase in condescending to local groups by telling them
how they should be conducting themselves on matters of truth. Who
claims to be the all-knowing God who would speak from such a height-
ened perch? People have different kinds of expertise as well as different
perspectives, typically nurtured in the context of groups they were
socialized into. Interpretation of facts depends on expertise and per-
spective, but it is more complicated than that. The dictionary may tell
us that a fact is a thing that is indisputably true, yet the dictionary con-
tains not Objective Truth, but conventional word-shaped objects—and
fact happens to be one of them. Words in the dictionary refer to one
another even though we might like them to point at objects in reality.
 2 NARRATIVE AS MEANING-UNIT 23

This feature of language heightens the ambiguity and dubiety inherent

in public policy discourse. And so again, the more varying perspectives
on the facts there are, the more competing narratives there are, the more
important is narrative policy inquiry in sorting through the politics of
pluralism.
One of the challenges in studying units of meaning such as ideograph
or narrative is their lack of fixity. They cannot be treated like the static
categories that a formal theory would typically presuppose. Meanings are
in flux as history moves and as attitudes change. Meaning has a dynamic
pliability; it can be altered by connotations and by context. Yet to some
extent meaning can be stabilized within narratives long enough to be
studied and assessed. “Stabilized” here does not imply fixed perma-
nency, though long durability is possible and change in meaning is not
inevitable. Meaning units such as sign, ideograph and narrative evolve
over time, varying with society’s evolving understanding of social real-
ity. Stability of connotative meaning presupposes stability of context.
Outside of a context, signs are difficult to interpret. With no context,
think of the term rock. It could refer to a variety of concepts. At some
moment in a specific context (for example, during a conversation) the
sign “rock” takes on specific meaning. Rock could have been a gui-
tar-oriented musical genre, or something one does gently while singing
a lullaby to a baby, or it could have been a compressed geological for-
mation. The specific context produces a conception of the sign that is
inextricably linked to the context of the user of the sign. Other meanings
of rock are excluded at that point in favor of the one that is necessitated
or imposed by the context. The multiplicity of prior contexts in which
the sign “rock” was deployed is indicative of the multiplicity of mean-
ings that are available when the time comes. When the time comes, it is
always in a specific context.
The importance of context brings narrative back into the pic-
ture, as narratives can also function as context. Contexts such as
music, baby care, or geology make the meaning of rock clear, and
the same is true of contexts such as narrative. In cannabis policy dis-
course, for example, words such as hemp, weed, and marijuana all
point denotatively toward the same plant, but their varying con-
notations become clear only in the context of a narrative. In the
American cultural context, “hemp” connotes an agricultural prod-
uct while “marijuana” connotes medical or psychoactive effects—
but which is it, medical or psychoactive? Without the context of a
24 H. T. MILLER

narrative, the meaning of the sign is difficult to pin down; hence a stand-
alone sign functions poorly as a unit of meaning in a policy analysis. A
content analysis that merely counts words cannot assess the meaning of
those words and ignores their narrative context. Hence, narratives are
the meaning units that provide context to symbolizations such as sign or
ideograph; they integrate meaning and they function to warrant one pol-
icy prescription or another.

2  Situating the Narrative Politics Model

In his early book on narrative policy analysis, Roe (1994) owns the accu-
sation from some literary theorists that he is neopositivist, though this
would not be self-evident if he had not said so himself in the preface.
He also claims affinity with both structuralism and poststructuralism. His
approach is to take ambiguous and complex policy issues and, through
the lens of literary theory, find out what kind of text (or what reading
of that text) one arrives at. “Stories commonly used in describing and
analyzing policy issues are a force in themselves, and must be considered
explicitly in assessing policy options” (Roe 1994, 2). Roe thus ascribes
agency to stories, and further notes that some of these stories resist
change even when data contradict them. This is because sets of assump-
tions for decision making are underwritten by these same stories, lend-
ing stability in a policy context marked by uncertainty, complexity, and
polarization. In such a context, truth and tractability cannot be estab-
lished by conventional means. Roe’s literary categories are stories, nonsto-
ries (such as circular arguments that have no beginning, middle, or end)
and counterstories that are juxtaposed against the dominant narrative. By
comparing stories, on the one hand, with counterstories and nonstories
on the other hand, a metanarrative is discovered or constructed by the
consultant. (This is a different understanding of metanarrative than the
conceptualization Lyotard (1984) had developed years earlier.) If it all
works out, a new and better policy narrative is arrived at, one that can
rearticulate the decision-making assumptions and transcend paralysis and
polarization—but “no guarantees” he adds (2).
Lejano et al. (2013), too, borrow from literary theory, but in a struc-
turally different way. They deploy literature-analytic concepts as heuristic
devices. These literary categories include: plurivocity to assess the change
in the story over time; emplotment to track the sequence of events or
causal arguments that lead to solutions; characterization to identify the
 2 NARRATIVE AS MEANING-UNIT 25

actors (who could be heroes, villains, victims, or tricksters) who drive the
plot; alterity to focus on outsiders and identities, and to distinguish the
like-minded from those who are not; breach and gap to signal a narra-
tive’s sense of what the problem is; and context to situate the narrative’s
substance in a societal condition (Lejano et al. 2018). The anthropo-
logical effect of using this structural approach is that groups or subcul-
tures can be heard, and their stories better understood. Lejano et al.
(2013) have used this approach to informative effect in their book on
environmental networks and narrative coherence within such networks.
Environmental narratives were able to transcend boundaries between
local groups and outside experts, raising the possibility that narratives
function as a sort of glue that binds a network of associations together.
Even in the face of government inaction with respect to public policy,
the power of narrative in these networks helped change actual agricul-
tural practices of farmers in the region. Ingram et al. (2015) described a
“narrative network” that brought non-human actants into the picture—
to the effect of integrating institutional arrangements into environmental
matters of concern. “We posit that narratives are essential in catalysing
and sustaining environmental networks, and enabling them to exert
influence” (3). A narrative network is “a mutually constitutive group of
actors (human and non-human) and ideas. By mutually constituting, we
mean that a narrative … is what organizes people and gives the group
structure; and, it is in the assemblage of actors that we find a community
of narrators that allows the emergence of the narrative” (4). As the coali-
tion’s cohering edifice, a narrative network is able to transcend potential
geographic, economic, and cultural divides.
Jones and McBeth (2010) take a scientistic approach that also
deploys literary categories such as setting/context, plot, characters
(who fix problems, cause problems, or are victims), and moral of the
story (policy solutions). Their literary devices function not so much as
heuristic devices as testable hypotheses. This approach has carved out
a considerable niche in the public policy literature by deploying main-
stream, Popperian notions of hypothesis testing within the still-emerging
study of policy narratives.
While many policy scholars have borrowed literary categories to salu-
tary effect, not all can make the literary approach work. Sometimes nar-
rative policy analysis is asked to do too little. Policy scholars who deploy
literary approaches sometimes are more interested in monitoring policy
narratives for their faithfulness to literary categories than their policy
26 H. T. MILLER

implications or their political situatedness. Literary categories, when

first introduced by Roe (1994), revealed public policy proposals to be
story-like accounts. And the use of literary categories has enabled many
analysts to explore varying perspectives on a policy matter, and to gain a
focused and comparative interpretation of what is at stake between and
among the varying perspectives. This advantage cannot be disregarded,
but today students of public policy no longer resist making an inter-
pretive link between policy proposals and narratives. Pointing out that
policy proposals are analyzable using literary categories is no longer an
innovative contribution. Yet one can still encounter authors who lay out
their criteria—beginning-middle-end, character, plot, chronology, and so
on—and show how policy proposals, legislative debates, court rulings,
etc. can be interpreted using such criteria. Too much focus on literary
categories can steer students of narrative inquiry away from the politi-
cal contestations that are at stake. In the Narrative Politics model, the
important point is not whether policy proposals are analyzable via such
literary devices (of course they are), but how the narrative functions in
a political contest with other narratives, usually with the aim of being
enacted into public policy.
One sensible test for the ultimate efficacy of a narrative in a policy
discourse is that it gets adopted. Adjustments to tactics, strategies, or
to narrative substance, made in the heat of competition, are also worth
observing and describing. Hence narrative inquiry that focuses on polit-
ical conflict can serve to highlight narrative competition among factions
in the policy discourse (e.g. McBeth and Clemons 1999; Dodge and
Lee 2015). Tweaking the fracking policy narrative to focus on commu-
nity prosperity, for example, expands the range of concerns and options
(Dodge 2015). Moreover, Dodge points out, gridlock is not necessar-
ily a fixed condition, and it is not necessarily dysfunctional, as any tem-
porary stasis may soon become dynamic again. Dodge and Lee (2015)
depict a dynamic, fluid and evolving process, where disagreements
about meanings reside at the center of policy controversies. Selected
facts, theories, norms, and arguments orient the issue for each coalition.
Competing coalitions are sometimes able to reframe the matters of con-
cern to reshape coalition boundaries, enhancing the odds of forming a
winning coalition (Metze and Dodge 2016; Dodge and Metze 2017).
Coalitions can change their perspectives, these authors point out, sug-
gesting a dynamic not of fixity but of breaking apart and re-forming in
a new way. Dodge (2016) further shows that competing advocates can
 2 NARRATIVE AS MEANING-UNIT 27

generate conflict by defining the substantive problems and solutions dif-

ferently. They can also problematize other coalitions’ forms of knowl-
edge, their strategies, and their legitimacy—potentially exacerbating the
nastiness and divisiveness of the political contest.
The Narrative Politics model highlights the policy narrative as the
major agent in the field of political competition. Discourse coalitions,
armed with their constitutive narratives, engage with other discourse
coalitions similarly armed. While this weaponization of policy narratives
engaged in political competition may seem a bit militaristic, it enables
the curator to feature narratives—not other people or other groups—
as the thing that is shot down or defeated. The curator can frame the
narrative as a meaning-unit that competes with other meaning-units for
subscribers. The Narrative Politics approach forces the curator or ana-
lyst to “hear the other side” (Spicer 2015), to appreciate the emotional
resonance of a narrative, to understand the role of identity in subscrib-
ing to a narrative, and to sensitize inquiry to the values that are at stake.
Of course, one cannot expect narrative inquiry to obviate ad hominem
attacks in political discourse, nor can it elide the inequality of resources
that is omnipresent in politics. Instead, the Narrative Politics model seeks
out social constructions of meaning rather than characteristics of any
particular individual or group as the object of inquiry. Otherwise, the
emphasis on individual responsibility in neoliberal societies deflects atten-
tion from culture and history and vests the individual with accomplish-
ments, failures, and accidents. In the Narrative Politics model, culpability
can thus be redirected and separated from the individual, thereby avoid-
ing the false “responsibilization” of citizens (Grey 1997; Ilcan and Basok
2004; Shamir 2008). By emphasizing narrative competition, policy nar-
ratives can be readily appreciated as political phenomena in democratic
societies. The contestation among them entails a variety of survival strat-
egies. Sticky narratives (Heath and Heath 2007) can be difficult to disen-
gage from, but there may be a tipping point where a dominant narrative
loses its standing and a new narrative gains traction (Gladwell 2000; see
also Baumgartner and Jones [1993] on punctuated equilibrium).
Gatekeepers of the dominant narrative may view new symbolic expo-
sures as a threat to their favored story. Some of the tactics that have been
deployed are easily recognizable authoritarian maneuvers. The impris-
onment (or worse) of journalists, political protesters, or opponents who
bring alter-narratives into the picture has a long history, unfortunately.
Counternarratives may function not only as opposition to a dominant
28 H. T. MILLER

narrative but may also support it. Fundamentalist religious narratives

rely on alter-narratives, such as secular liberalism, for energy and mean-
ing (Crowley 2006). There are various means and mechanisms for con-
demning the alter-narrative, some more nefarious than others. Treating
dissidence as heresy or apostasy are ways that religious narratives have
suppressed competition. Dominant narratives ensure their own dura-
bility through such practices. A culturally embedded narrative does not
necessarily welcome new knowledge. However, adaptation and coop-
tation may also be effective survival strategies in some contexts. Older
and more institutionalized narratives have access to a broad array of gate-
keeping maneuvers to ward off or ingratiate potential competitors.
A research approach that respects historical and cultural context as
formative of narrative meaning is required of a curator using the Narrative
Politics model. The template for this way of going about research is
Michel Foucault’s genealogical method. Foucault (1998) calls into ques-
tion attempts to impose uniformity upon any sort of social inquiry. In that
essay, titled “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” he criticized Paul Ree, a con-
temporary of Friedrich Nietzsche, because “He assumed that words had
kept their meaning, that desires still pointed in a single direction, and that
ideas retained their logic; and he ignored the fact that the world of speech
and desires has known invasions, struggles, plundering, disguises, ploys”
(Foucault 1998, 369). Foucault’s genealogical approach is sensitive to dis-
continuities and reversals as well as continuities, because “to follow the
complex course of descent [that is, historical lineage] is to maintain pass-
ing events in their proper dispersion; it is to identify the accidents, the min-
ute deviations—or conversely, the complete reversals—the errors, the false
appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things which
continue to exist and have value for us …” (Foucault 1998, 374). Similarly,
in the Narrative Politics model, policy narratives have something like a
career or maybe a life cycle. A policy narrative performs a political function;
it sometimes takes on a different job or joins a different alliance. Its career
can abruptly end, or it can outlast generations of humans.
In the Narrative Politics model, narratives are vested with discursive pos-
sibilities that enable political contestation and the formation of alliances.
Eventually, narratives may ultimately disappear when their resonance fades.
One can subscribe or unsubscribe to a narrative, and one can identify more
or less intensely with a narrative. Chapter 3 engages next the phenomenon
of narrative subscription.
 2 NARRATIVE AS MEANING-UNIT 29

References
Barthes, Roland. 1972. Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and
Wang.
Baumgartner, Frank, and Bryan Jones. 1993. Agendas and Instability in
American Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Berenson, Alex. 2019. What Advocates of Legalizing Pot Don’t Want You to
Know. New York Times, Jan 4. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/04/
opinion/marijuana-pot-health-risks-legalization.html. Accessed 19 Feb 2019.
Crowley, Sharon. 2006. Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism.
Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Dodge, Jennifer. 2015. The Deliberative Potential of Civil Society
Organizations: Framing Hydraulic Fracturing in New York. Policy Studies 36
(3): 249–266.
Dodge, Jennifer. 2016. Crowded Advocacy: Framing Dynamics in the Fracking
Controversy in New York. Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and
Nonprofit Organizations 25 (5). http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11266-016-
9800-6. Accessed 23 June 2019.
Dodge, Jennifer, and Jeongyoon Lee. 2015. Framing Dynamics and Policy
Gridlock: The Curious Case of Hydraulic Fracturing in New York. Journal
of Environmental Policy and Planning. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15239
08X.2015.1116378 (online first). Accessed 23 June 2019.
Dodge, Jennifer, and Tamara Metze. 2017. Hydraulic Fracturing as an
Interpretive Policy Problem: Lessons on Energy Controversies in Europe
and the U.S.A. Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning 19 (1): 1–13.
https://doi.org/10.1080/1523908X.2016.1277947.
Elevald, Anja. 2012. The Role of Rhetoric and Affect in Policy Changes: The
Case of Dutch Life Course Policy. Critical Policy Studies 6 (3): 282–303.
Fording, Richard C., Joe Soss, and Sanford F. Schram. 2008. Distributing
Discipline: Race, Politics, and Punishment at the Frontlines of Welfare Reform.
University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research Discussion Paper Series
DP2008-06. http://www.ukcpr.org/Publications/DP2008-06.pdf. Accessed
14 Aug 2019.
Foucault, Michel. 1998. Nietzsche, Genealogy, History. In Michel Foucault:
Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. Volume Two of Essential Works of
Foucault, 1954–1984, trans. Robert Hurley et al. and ed. James D. Faubion.
New York: The New Press.
Gladwell, Malcolm. 2000. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big
Difference. New York: Little, Brown and Company.
Grey, Christopher. 1997. Management as a Technical Practice: Professionalization or
Responsibilization? Systems Practice 10 (6): 703–725.
30 H. T. MILLER

Hajer, Maarten A. 1993. Discourse Coalitions and the Institutionalization of

Practice: The Case of Acid Rain in Great Britain. In The Argumentative Turn
in Policy Analysis and Planning, ed. Frank Fischer and John Forester, 43–76.
Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Hajer, Maarten A. 2005. Coalitions, Practices, and Meaning in Environmental
Politics: From Acid Rain to BSE (Chapter 12). In Discourse Theory in
European Politics: Identity, Policy and Governance, ed. David Howarth and
Jacob Torfing, 297–315. Houndmills, Basingstoke, and Hampshire, UK:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Heath, Chip, and Dan Heath. 2007. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and
Others Die. New York: Random House.
Ilcan, Susan, and Tanya Basok. 2004. Community Government: Voluntary
Agencies, Social Justice and the Responsibilization of Citizens. Citizenship
Studies 8 (2): 129–144.
Ingram, Mrill, Helen Ingram, and Raul Lejano. 2015. Environmental Action
in the Anthropocene: The Power of Narrative Networks. Journal of
Environmental Policy & Planning. https://doi-org.ezproxy.fau.edu/10.1080
/1523908X.2015.1113513. Accessed 14 Nov 2018.
Jones, Michael D., and Mark K. McBeth. 2010. A Narrative Policy Framework:
Clear Enough to be Wrong? Policy Studies Journal 38 (2): 329–353.
Lejano, Raul, Mrill Ingram, and Helen Ingram. 2013. The Power of Narrative in
Environmental Networks. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lejano, Raul, Mrill Ingram, and Helen Ingram. 2018. Narrative in the Policy
Process (Chapter 18). In Handbook on Policy, Process, and Governing, ed.
H.K. Colbatch and Robert Hoppe, 309–326. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar
Publishing.
Lejano, Raul P., and Ching Leong. 2012. A Hermeneutic Approach to Explaining
and Understanding Public Controversies. Journal of Public Administration
Research and Theory 22: 793–814. https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/mus001.
Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on
Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
McBeth, Mark K., and Randall S. Clemons. 1999. Postmodern Policy Analysis
in the Premodern West: Problem Definition in the Yellowstone Bison Case.
Administrative Theory & Praxis 21 (2): 161–175.
McGee, Michael C. 1980. The “Ideograph”: A Link Between Rhetoric and
Ideology. Quarterly Journal of Speech 66: 1–16.
Metze, Tamara, and Jennifer Dodge. 2016. Dynamic Discourse Coalitions
on Hydro-Fracking in Europe and the United States. Environmental
Communication 10 (3): 365–379.
Miller, Hugh T. 2004. The Ideographic Individual. Administrative Theory and
Praxis 25 (4): 469–488.
Miller, Hugh T. 2012. Governing Narratives: Symbolic Politics and Policy Change.
Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
 2 NARRATIVE AS MEANING-UNIT 31

Miller, Hugh T. 2019. Narrative Subscription in Public Policy Discourse.

Critical Policy Studies 13 (3): 241–260. https://doi.org/10.1080/1946017
1.2018.1429937.
Reynolds, Gretchen. 2019. The Stoner as Gym Rat. New York Times, May 8.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/08/well/mind/exercise-marijua-
na-cannabis-pot-workout.html?searchResultPosition=1. Accessed 24 May
2019.
Roe, Emery. 1994. Narrative Policy Analysis: Theory and Practice. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Sabatier, Paul A., and Christopher M. Weible. 2007. The Advocacy Coalition
Framework: Innovations and Clarifications (Chapter 7). In Theories of the
Policy Process, ed. Paul A. Sabatier. Cambridge, MA: Westview Press.
Sabatier, Paul A., and Hank C. Jenkins-Smith. 1993. Policy Change and
Learning: An Advocacy Coalition Approach. Boulder, CO: Westview.
de Saussure, Ferdinand. 1983. Course in General Linguistics. Peru, IL: Open
Court Publishing.
Shamir, Ronen. 2008. The Age of Responsibilization: On Market Embedded
Morality. Economy and Society 37 (1): 1–19.
Smith-Lovin, Lynn. 1990. Emotion as the Confirmation and Disconfirmation of
Identity: An Affect Control Model (Chapter 9). In Research Agendas in the
Sociology of Emotions, ed. Theodore D. Kemper. Albany: State University of
New York Press.
Spicer, Michael W. 2015. Neutrality, Adversary Argument, and Constitutionalism
in Public Administration. Administrative Theory & Praxis 37 (3): 188–202.
https://doi.org/10.1080/10841806.2015.1053363.
Stevens, Jeff. 2012. The Frames and Ideographs of Water Reuse Policy
Discourses: An Application of Narrative Analysis and Text Analytics. Doctoral
Dissertation. Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL.
Stone, Deborah. 2012. Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making, 3rd
ed. New York: Norton.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2009. Philosophical Investigations. Fourth edition trans-
lated by G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte. Revised
fourth editions translated by P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte. Chichester,
West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.
Yanow, Dvora. 1996. How Does a Policy Mean? Interpreting Policy and
Organizational Actions. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
 CHAPTER 3

Narrative Subscription

Abstract How does one come to subscribe to one policy narrative and
not another? This chapter articulates a process of “identification-with”
that evokes past experience in referent groups where common under-
standings and conventions picked up in social life are associated with a
policy narrative. These associations and identifications are malleable over
time. One may unsubscribe to a policy narrative, and one’s commitments
to a narrative can vary in intensity of emotional commitment and value
resonance. Narrative subscription also depends on context, whether
historical, cultural, or situational. Change of context can bring about a
change of aspect.

Keywords Affect · Identity · Identification · Referent group ·

Change of context

This chapter is a revised version of a previously published article: Miller, Hugh T.,
‘Narrative subscription in public policy discourse’, Critical Policy Studies, 13:3
(2019), 241–260. © 2018 Institute of Local Government Studies, University of
Birmingham, reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd., http://www.
tandfonline.com on behalf of Institute of Local Government Studies, University
of Birmingham.

© The Author(s) 2020 33

H. T. Miller, Narrative Politics in Public Policy,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45320-6_3
34 H. T. MILLER

1  Narrative Subscription as Identification

The first dictionary definition of subscription specifies the regular receipt
of something, like a magazine, that was paid for in advance. What I
mean by subscription fits the second definition, which is to express
agreement with an idea, a proposal—or a narrative. Subscribing to
a narrative is evidenced when one is persuaded by an argument, when
one adopts a consonant ideological position, when one is convinced.
Narrative subscription can be tentative—subject to new data, logical
argumentation, evidence, and logical coherence, as in academic and
scientific communities and elsewhere. But in public policy discourse,
narrative subscription is subject not only to logic and evidence, but also
to other powerful forces such as emotions, values, group identification,
and symbolic connotations. To understand narrative subscription is to
understand the political will that sustains seemingly unreasonable public
policies such as the United States’ war on drugs. The complex dynamics
of narrative subscription entail identification, emotional investment,
value resonance, context, and symbolic connotation as well as rationality.
By juxtaposing the rationality project against the polis, Stone (2012)
demonstrates how political contestation around policy goals, problems
and solutions delimits rationality. Rationality has been a problematic
aspiration in public policy discourse for quite some time now (Yanow
1996; Fischer 1995, 2003). Fisher (1984) noted that analyzing impor-
tant public issues such as the nuclear arms race using the “rational world
paradigm” (15) was disturbingly inadequate and so offered his nar-
rative paradigm as a way of understanding public moral argument. He
proposed that “a significant feature of compelling stories is that they
provide a rationale for decision and action” (Fisher 1985, 364).
Narratives serve as useful units of analysis, and useful units of meaning,
in the study of public policy discourse. Different narratives provide
different rationales, draw on different facts, elicit different images
and emotions, and imply different recommendations for public policy
proposals. The assumption here is that public policy discourse is com-
posed of competing narratives, which reveal the contours of politi-
cal contestation. Narratives are constituted by symbolic, cognitive, and
emotional elements that are integrated via story lines, often crafted to
inform and influence policy proposals. Their rationality quotient may or
may not be what wins subscribers to a policy narrative. Rational cogni-
tions, logic, values, and feelings combine to inform one’s attitude toward
 3 NARRATIVE SUBSCRIPTION 35

any policy proposal; narrative identification integrates both rational and

non-rational elements to attract narrative subscriptions.
If narrative identification determines narrative subscription, how does
such identification with a policy proposal come about? Once a narrative
is in circulation, why does it attract subscribers? Identification, invoked
here as a verb rather than a noun (identity), helps narrow the scope of
relevant literature. Narrative subscription is a moment of identifica-
tion-with. One can come to identify with a religious narrative, a secu-
lar narrative, an anti-war narrative, a fascist narrative, a climate-change
narrative, or an anti-immigration narrative. What constitutes such attach-
ments? Among the policy narratives that circulate in any given public
policy discourse, why would a person subscribe to one policy narrative
over another? Why does one agree or disagree with the “climate change”
narrative? Does the climate change narrative challenge the favored
anti-regulatory narrative of the powerful? (Fischer 2019). Does antago-
nism toward liberal, science-regarding intellectual-types have explanatory
power here? Other questions quickly follow. How do newly resonant
narratives come to displace formerly dominant public policy narratives?
Although narratives can legitimize policy proposals, narrative subscrip-
tion by an individual implies little about the broad legitimacy of the nar-
rative, particularly among the non-subscribers. Legitimacy is afforded to
a narrative when it comes to dominate the field—by gaining subscribers
and political prominence—in a policy discourse.
Identity in its noun form often carries the misleading implication
of fixity and permanency. To avoid presupposing fixity, I use the term
identity guardedly, with the understanding that identity is necessar-
ily a social construction rather than a fixed essentialism (Stavrakakis
2005). “Identities in this perspective are not given or primordial enti-
ties, which are reducible to real interests or structural locations in a social
formation, but precarious constructions…” (Howarth 2010, 314). I,
too, see identities as social constructions that have more or less stabil-
ity, and vary by context. However, Brubaker and Cooper (2000) argue
that such a social constructivist stance drains identity of analytic pur-
chase; that identity is being asked to do too much work in accounting
for particularistic claims. However, subscription to a policy narrative does
not require a stable, autobiographical self, as Brubaker and Cooper pre-
suppose. In the Narrative Politics model, identification allows temporary
attachment or enduring commitment to any particular narrative.
Without identification, there would be little affective charge to the
36 H. T. MILLER

subscribed narrative. Meaning would deflate, as may have happened with

both the Abstinence narrative and the Nativism narrative within the can-
nabis policy discourse (coming up in Chapter 4).
At the micro-level, identifications can originate in childhood experi-
ences, so parsing out the dynamics of one’s coming to identify with a
policy narrative can be contextual to the point of being autobiographical.
Exposure to a narrative can be influenced by a trusted authority figure,
by conversations with neighbors or associates, by media attention to it,
by marketing-style advertising, or by other situational encounters that I
will not attempt to catalog here, except to note that social psychologists
often attribute identity formation to interpersonal interaction as well
as group and inter-group interaction (e.g., Hogg et al. 1995; Stets and
Burke 2003). Identification has its own prerequisite—communities (or,
variously, societies or groups). Without communities, the examination of
how identity and emotions interact would be a highly cognitive affair,
over-reliant on individual autonomy (Creed et al. 2014).
Conceptions of identity vary among the fields of psychology (where
identity is about the self), political science (where it often, but not
always, refers to alliances based on race, sex, religion, ethnicity, etc.
rather than political party or class position), and sociology. Sociology
expands the domain of identification to include role identity and other
identities that depend on a social referent group, which can vary from
family, to organizational membership, to group, to religious affiliation,
and to nation or society. In explicating their social identity approach,
Hornung et al. (2019, 217) are interested in “which social identities
are salient under which policy-related circumstances and in what way
they shape individual policy preferences, decision-making and political
behavior.” Policy actors are presumed to possess multiple social identi-
ties due to their identification with multiple social groups. Strength of
identification is a matter of degree, varying according to intangibles—
such as a feeling of group belonging, subjective group evaluation,
or strength of emotional bond (218). It is important to underscore
that narratives are not objects of analysis undertaken by individuals in
isolation from society. “[T]he nature of the self and what individuals
do depends to a large extent on the society within which they live”
(Stets and Burke 2003, 128). Social interaction conditions meaning,
and hence social structure influences one’s identity. “[H]aving multi-
ple role identities is more beneficial than harmful to individuals because
it gives their lives meaning and provides guides to behavior” (136).
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
ver, mira qual pena es mayor: la
que sientes viendo, o la que
ausente padezes por ver; aquí
juzgarás mi mal qué tal es. En fin,
que tú careces de consejo e
confiança, yo de consuelo y
esperança; tú buscas compañia,
yo huyo della; tú desseas gozar,
yo morir; lo que tú no dessearas
si quiera por ver a Belisena. Mira
qué mal te causa verla. Assi que
en esto no habria cabo, creeme, y
dexalo estar; y pues que lo que
en la caça te acontecio me has
hecho saber, Felisel te contará lo
que a mi en otra me ha seguido,
sobre lo qual hize esta obra que
aqui te embio.

VISION DE AMOR EN QUE

VASQUIRAN CUENTA LAS
COSAS QUE VIO ESTANDO
TRASPUESTO, Y LO QUE
HABLO Y LE
RESPONDIERON.

Combatido de dolores
e penosos pensamientos,
desesperado d'amores,
congoxado de tormentos,
vi que mis males mayores
turbauan mis sentimientos,
e turbado,
yo me puse de cansado
a pensar
las tristeças e pesar
 que causauan mi cuydado.
E vi que la soledad
teniendome conpañia
no me tiene piedad
de las penas que sentia,
mas con mucha crueldad
lastimaua mi porfia
de dolor
diziendome: pues que amor
te tiene tal,
no te quexes de mi mal
qu'es de todos el mayor.

(Responde Vasquiran á la
soledad.)
Si el menor mal de mi mal
eres tú e de mis enojos
teniendome siempre tal
que me sacas a manojos
con rabia triste mortal
las lagrimas a los ojos
de passion
sacadas del coraçon
donde estan,
dime qué tales seran
los que mas crueles son.

(Prosigue.)
Con mi soledad hablando
sin tornar a responderme,
ni dormiendo, ni velando,
ni sabiendo qué hazerme
en mis males contemplando,
comence a trasponerme
no dormido
mas traspuesto sin sentido
no de sueño
mas como quien de veleño
sus ponçoñas ha beuido.
Pues sintiendo desta suerte
mis sentidos ya dexarme
aun qu'el dolor era fuerte
comence de consolarme;
dixe: cierto esto es la muerte,
que ya viene a remediarme
segun creo;
mas dudo pues no la veo
qu'esta es ella
por hazer que mi querella
crezca mas con su desseo.
Y con tal medio turbado
mas qu'en ver mi vida muerta,
aunque del pesar cansado
comence la vista abierta
a mirar é vi en vn prado
vna muy hermosa huerta
de verdura,
yo dudando en mi ventura
dixe: duermo
y en sueño qu'esto es vn
yermo
como aqui se me figura.
Y assi estando yo entre mi
turbado desta manera
comence quexarme assi;
no quiere el morir que muera;
luego mas abaxo vi
vna hermosa ribera
que baxaua
de vna montaña qu'estaua
de boscaje
muy cubierta, e vi vn saluaje
que por ella passeaua.
Vile que volvio a mirarme
con vn gesto triste y fiero,
yo comence de alegrarme
e a decir: si aqui le espero
este viene a remediarme
con la muerte que yo quiero,
mas llegado
vile muy acompañado
que traya
gente que mi compañia
por mi mal hauian dexado.

(Admiracion.)
Comenceme de admirar
dudando si serian ellos,
por mejor determinar
acorde de muy bien vellos
tornandolos a mirar
y acabé de conocellos
claramente,
dixe entre mi: ciertamente
agora creo
qu'es complido mi desseo
pues que a mí torna esta
gente.

(Declara quien viene con el

saluaje
e de la manera que viene.)
Mis plazeres derramados
venian sin ordenança
guarnecidos de cuydados,
ya perdida su esperança,
diziendo: fuymos trocados
con la muerte y la mudança
que ha mudado
nuestras glorias en cuydado
de dolor
pues do el gozo era mayor
mis tristeças ha dexado.
Vi mi descanso al costado
con vna ropa pardilla
de trabajo muy cansado
assentado en vna silla
de dolor bien lastimado
publicando su mancilla
e su pesar,
començando de cantar
esta cancion:
no me dexe la passion
un momento reposar.
Venia el contentamiento
más cansado vn poco atras
con esquiuo pensamiento
sospirando sin compas,
diziendo: de descontento
no espero plazer jamas
que me contente,
pues murio publicamente
quien causaua
el bien que me contentaua,
ya plazer no me consiente.
Mi esperança vi primera
de amarillo ya vestida
quexando desta manera:
donde s'acabó la vida,
¿qué remedio es el que
espera
la esperança qu'es perdida
e acabada?
verse mas desesperada
de remedio
pues que en el mal do no hay
medio
s'espera pena doblada.
Tambien vi a mi memoria
cubierta de mi dolor
recordandome la gloria
que senti siendo amador,
e con ella la vitoria
de los peligros d'amor
ya passados
porque no siendo oluidados
fuessen viuos
para hazer mas esquiuos
mis males e lastimados.
Mi desseo vi venir
postrero con gran pesar
e sentile assi dezir:
lo mejor es acabar
pues que s'acabó el viuir:
¿qué puedo ya dessear
sino la muerte?
para que acabe y concierte
que fenezça
mi dessear e padezça
lo que ha querido mi suerte

(Pregunta quien es el saluaje

y responde el Desseo.)
Como a mí los vi llegar
aunque muy turbado estaua
comence de demandar
quien era el que los guiaua
que con tan triste pesar
de contino me miraua
desnudado:
este es el tiempo passado
de tu gloria
el que agora tu memoria
atormenta con cuydado.

(El Desseo.)
Este que miras tan triste
con quien vees que venimos,
este es el que tú perdiste
por quien todos te perdimos,
que despues que no le vimos
nunca vn hora mas te vimos
ningun dia
e dexo en tu compañia
que te guarde
soledad, la que muy tarde
se va do hay alegria.
Pues aquella a quien
fablauas
diziendo que mal te trata
e aunque della te quexauas
no es ella la que te mata
mas es la que desseauas,
triste muerte cruda ingrata
robadora
que te quitó la señora
cuyo eras
e no quiere que tú mueras
por matarte cada hora.

(Responde y pregunta.)
Quien comigo razonaua
claramente lo entendia,
mas tan lexos de mi estaua
que aunque muy claro le oya
la distancia me quitaua
que ya no le conocia,
e atordido
dixe: bien os he entendido
mas no veo
quién soys vos. Soy tu desseo
que jamas verás complido.

(Pregunta á su desseo
y respondele.)
Demandale, como estas
tan apartado de aqui
que yo siento que me das
mil congoxas dentro en mi?
Dixo: nunca me veras
qu'estoy muy lexos de ti,
sé que desseas
verme, pero no lo creas,
porque amor
no consiente en tu dolor
por saluarte que me veas.

Qu'este jardin que aqui esta

con tantas rosas y flores
es el lugar que se da
a los buenos sofridores
que con mucha lealtad
en su mal sufren dolores,
y es ley esta
y an los amadores puesta
por razon
que gana tal galardon
el que mas caro le cuesta.

(Replica.)
 Quando bien lo houe
entendido
tanto mal creció en mi mal,
que ya como aborrecido
dixe con rabia mortal:
¿quién ha tanto mal sofrido
que del mio sea ygual
en nada dél?
pues porqué si es tan cruel
bien no merezco
la muerte pues la padezco
con la misma vida dél?

Quanto más que yo no

quiero
mi suerte más mejorada,
ni más beneficio espero
que la muerte ver llegada,
pues qu'en desealla muero
mateme de vna vegada
con matar,
e si esto amor quiere dar
que a ti te plaze,
poco es el bien que te haze
pues da fin a tu pesar.

(El Desseo replica.)

Que la pena aborrecida
con que tú te desesperas
es que mueres con la vida
ante qu'en la muerte mueras,
que es la gloria conocida
de todo el bien que ya
esperas,
y essa fue
con quien Petrarca y su fee
ganó la voz
de martir, e Badajoz
sin otros mill que yo sé.

(Cuenta como vio su amiga.)

Escuchandole turbado
sin saber qué responder
vi venir por medio un prado
quien causaua mi plazer
y agora con su cuydado
tan triste me haze ser;
pues en vella
yo me fuy muy rezio a ella,
e allegado
me vide resuscitado
quando pude conocella.

(Habla Vasquiran a su amiga.)

Viendome con tal vitoria
comencele de dezir:
mi bien, mi dios, y mi gloria,
¿cómo puedo yo viuir
viendo viua tu memoria
despues que te vi morir?
¿No bastaua
el dolor que yo pasaua
a no matarme?
pero no queria acabarme
porque yo lo desseaua.

(Responde Violina.)
Començo de responderme:
ya sé quanto viues triste
en perderte y en perderme
el dia que me perdiste:
e sé que en solo no verme
nunca más descanso viste,
e tambien sé
que t'atormenta mi fe,
e assi siento
más mal en tu sentimiento
qu'en la muerte que passé.
Pero deues consolarte
e dexarme reposar
pues que por apassionarte
no me puedes ya cobrar
ni menos por tú matarte
podré yo resuscitar,
e tu pena
a los dos ygual condena,
e tu dolor
lo sintieras muy mayor
si me vieras ser agena.

(Responde Vasquiran.)
Todo el mal que yo sentia
y el tormento que passaua,
si penaua, si moria,
tu desseo lo causaua,
que jamas noche ni dia
nunca vn hora me dexaua,
mas agora
que te veo yo, señora,
yo no espero
más dolor ni más bien quiero
de mirarte cada hora.

(Violina.)
 Tú piensas que soy aquella
que en tu desseo desseas
e que acabas tu querella;
no lo pienses ni lo creas
bien que soy memoria della,
mas no esperes que me veas
ya jamas,
que aunque comigo estás
soy vision
metida en tu coraçon
con la pena que le das.
Tus males y tus enojos
con tu mucho dessear
te pintan a mi en tus ojos
que me puedas contemplar,
pero no son sino antojos
para darte más pesar
e más despecho,
que mi cuerpo ya es dessecho
e consumido
y en lo mesmo convertido
de do primero fue hecho.

(Vasquiran.)
Casi atonito en oylla
como sin seso turbado,
quisse llegarme y asilla,
e halleme tan pesado
como quien la pesadilla
sueña que le tiene atado
de manera
que no pude aunque quisiera
más hablalle,
e assi la vi por el valle
tornarse por do viniera.
Quando tal desdicha vi
 causada sin mas concierto
luego yo dixe entre mi:
ciertamente no soy muerto;
estando en esto senti
mi paje y vime despierto
acostado
sobre vn lecho, tan cansado
que quisiera
matarme sino temiera
el morir desesperado.
Vime tan aborrecido
que comence de dezir:
tanto mal mi mal ha sido
que me desecha el morir
conociendo que le pido;
dame muerte en el viuir
por alargar
mi pesar de más pesar
para que muera
viuiendo desta manera,
muriendo en el dessear.
Viue mi vida captiua
desseandose el morir
porque le haze el viuir
qu'el mismo que muere viua.
Quien la muerte se dessea
y la vida no le dexa
con mayor dolor l'aquexa
el viuir con quien pelea
qu'el morir que se le alexa,
pues la pena mas esquiua
de comportar y sofrir
es la muerte no viuir
do la vida muere viua.

E assi, Flamiano, estando qual

has oydo, creyendo que ya mis
fatigas eran acabadas con la
muerte como se començaron,
recordome un paje mio que entró
en la camara y assi con el plazer
que puedes pensar que de qual
estoy, hame parecido escrebirtelo
porque mis passatiempos sepas,
assi como tus desesperaciones
me escriues, que en ninguna cosa
hallarás que la razon te pueda dar
esperança. Nunca vi mejor
negocio para poner en razon que
passion de amores; si tanto en tu
caso entendieses como en el mio
piensas saber, verias como estas
cosas enamoradas ninguna dellas
por razon se govierna, porque son
cosas que la ventura las guia;
pues lo que ventura ha de hazer
qué has menester pesarlo con el
peso de la razon? Por tu fe que
cesses de más escreuirme sobre
esto, ni más ygualar tu question
con mi perdida, bastete que tú
has de esperar la ventura, yo ya
he desesperado con mi
desuentura.

LO QUE EN ESTE TIEMPO QUE

FELISEL FUE Y TORNÓ, SE
CONCERTO EN EL JUEGO DE
CAÑAS
En este tiempo la señora duquesa
con muchas otras damas e
señoras fue partida para
Virgiliano, y el señor cardenal con
todos los caualleros. En el qual
tiempo Flamiano dió orden en lo
que para el juego de cañas hauia
menester, y el señor cardenal
assimesmo. Fueron del puesto de
Flamiano el conde de la Marca, el
marques Calerin, el prior de
Albano, el marques de Villatonda,
el prior de Mariana, el duque de
Fenisa, el duque de Braverino, su
cuñado Francalver, el conde de
Sarriseno, Qusander el fauorido,
Galarino de Isian, Esclevan de la
Torre, Guillermo Lauro, el
marques de Persiana. Fueron con
el señor cardenal el conde de
Auertino, Atineo de Leuerin, el
conde de Ponteforto, Fermines de
Mesano, Francastino de Eredes,
Camilo de Leonis, Lisandro de
Xarqui, Preminer de Castilplano,
el marques de la Chesta, Alarcos
de Reyner, Pomerin, Russeler el
pacifico, Alualader de Caronis, el
conde Torrior, Perrequin de la
Gruta.
Salio primero Flamiano con todos
los de su partida e por ser el cabo
de aquel juego todos salieron de
las colores de la señora Belisena
con aljubas de brocado blanco e
raso encarnado, cada uno de la
manera que le parecio, con capas
del mismo raso forradas del
damasco blanco; algunos sacaron
sobre las mesmas colores
algunas invenciones de chaperia
de plata entre las quales fue vno
el marques de Persiana que sacó
vnas palmas de plata sembradas
por la ropa y vna palma grande en
medio de la adarga, con vnas
letras en torno que dezian:

La primera letra desta

tengo yo en las otras puesta.

No quiso Flamiano sacar más de

las colores por no perjudicar a los
que con él salian, mas sacó en
torno de la adarga y en vna
manga rica que sacó, unas letras
de oro esmaltadas que dezian:

De la obra qu'en mi hacen

vuestras colores y obras,
bastan a todos las sobras.

Sacó el señor prior de Albano

toda la marlota e adarga cubierta
de lazadas de oro con vna letra
en torno de la capa e de la adarga
bordada de oro que dezia:

No pueden desañudarse
las lazadas
estando en el alma atadas.

Sacó el señor prior de Mariana

vnas muestras de dechado
labradas en el adarga con vna
letra que dezia:
 No se muestra
lo que peno a causa vuestra.

Salidos todos, como en tal

muestra se suele salir, a vn llano
entre la villa y el mar donde en vn
gran tablado con mucha tapeceria
todas las damas estauan,
començaron entrellos mismos su
juego de cañas; habiendo jugado
vna pieça, el señor cardenal
aparecio con su batalla por
encima un montecico quanto un
tiro de ballesta de alli; venian en
su ordenança a usança de turcos
con sus añafiles e vanderas en
las lanças estradiotas. Salieron
todos con aljubas de brocado
negro forradas de raso pardillo,
con sus mascaras turquesas.
Pues al tiempo que se
descubrieron los dos del puesto
de Flamiano, juntaron todos, e
con alcanzias en las manos los
salieron a recebir al cabo del
llano, y echadas las alcanzias
quando a ellos llegaron dieron la
vuelta e los turcos con sus
estradiotas enristradas en el
alcance hasta ponerlos en el lugar
del juego; y ansi se trauó muy
reziamente, tanto que parecio a
todos muy gentil fiesta, e duró un
quarto de ora hasta que se
despartieron e passaron otra hora
en passar carreras los vnos a la
gineta, los otros a la estradiota.
Siendo ya tarde, la duquesa con
su hija Belisena e todas las otras
damas fueronse a apear a la
posada de la señora princesa,
donde se dió vna rica colacion, e
duró el dançar hasta la cena.
Pues en muy largo y ancho
corredor se paró vna tabla muy
larga, tanto que las damas cabian
a la una parte della, y todos los
caualleros a la otra. Excepto el
cardenal que no cenó alli, los
otros todos cenaron con mucha
alegria. Acauado el cenar todos
los caualleros se fueron a sus
aposentos e mudaron los vestidos
e tornaron a danzar e cada uno lo
más galan que venir pudo.
Llegado Flamiano a su posada
enbió su atauio a vn tanborino
dela señora duquesa que se
llamaua Perequin; todas las otras
ropas o las mas se dieron aquella
noche a los ministriles y
albardanes. Flamiano se detuuo
en su posada con otros quatro
caualleros para recitar aquella
noche vna egloga en la cual se
contiene pastorilmente todo lo
que en la caça con Belisena
passó. Quando supo que todos
los caualleros ya eran en casa de
la señora princesa y el dançar
començado, él partio de su
posada e con todo su concierto
llegó a la fiesta e recitó su egloga,
como aqui se recita.

INTRODUCCION DE LA
EGLOGA
Entran tres pastores e dos
pastoras, el principal qu'es
Flamiano se llama Torino. El otro
Guillardo. El otro Quiral que es
marques de Carliner. La principal
pastora se llama Benita, que es
Belisena. La otra se llama Illana
qu'es Isiana. Entra primero Torino
e sobre lo que Belisena le mandó
en la caça qu'es la fantasia de la
egloga, con vn laud tañe e canta
esta cancion que al principio de la
egloga está, y acostado debaxo
de vn pino que alli hazen traer;
acabado de cantar, comiença a
quexarse del mal que siente e del
amor. En el tiempo que él canta
entra Guillardo quél no lo siente;
oyele todo lo que habla,
marauillase no sabiendo la causa
qué mal puede tener que en tanta
manera le fatiga; comiença
consigo a hablar razonando qué
mal puede ser; ve venir a Quiral,
llamale e cuentale lo que ha oydo,
e juntos los dos lleganse a Torino
demandandole de qué dolor se
quexa, él se lo cuenta. Guillardo
no le entiende, Quiral si aunque
no al principio. Altercan entre
ellos gran rato, estando en la
contienda entra Benita, pideles
sobre qué contienden. Torino le
torna a decir en metro lo que en la
caça passó en prosa, y assi los
dos contienden. Al fin Benita se
va; quedan todos tres pastores en
su question. Acaban todos tres
con vn villancico cantado.

COMIENÇA LA CANCION
No es mi mal para sofrir
ni se puede remediar
pues deciende de lugar
do no se puede subir.
El remedio de mi vida
mi ventura no le halla
viendo que mi mal deualla
de do falta en la subida,
si se quiere arrepentir
mi querer para mudar
no puede, qu'está en lugar
do no se puede subir.

COMIENÇA LA EGLOGA
Y dize Torino.
O grave dolor, o mal sin
medida,
o ansia rabiosa mortal de
sofrirse,
ni puede callarse, ni osa
dezirse
el daño que acaba del todo mi
vida;
mi pena no puede tenerse