Challenging The Story:
How interpretive narratives drive policy and how research can change them
Milton Mueller
Associate Professor, Syracuse University School Of Information Studies
Policy makers in a fast-changing field such as information and communication
technology (ICT) face novel phenomena, an absence of clear historical precedent, high
levels of uncertainty, and a welter of competing and unsystematized sources of
information. The newer the social phenomenon with which they are dealing, the greater
the uncertainty about fundamental definitions and causal relationships. To bridge the gap
between what they know and the complex world out there, policymakers, like all other
decision makers, construct “stories” or interpretive narratives.
Social scientists need to accept the fact that it is politically-motivated interpretive
narratives, not “science” in the traditional sense, that guide policymaking in its formative
stages. Stories create order and meaning, and as such are ways of attracting and holding
attention and of economizing on evidence and intellectual effort. Narrative interpretations
fuse together the bits and pieces of heterogeneous information that policy makers must
deal with into something tangible and meaningful. Stories can then take on a life of their
own. To tell a story is to create a meme, a syntactical and semantic construction capable
of reproducing itself in a social context.
Business people, grant proposal writers, and policy makers in government all tacitly
understand the power and importance of narratives, and behave accordingly. A high
percentage of readers of policy reports only scan the executive summary, not the whole
report. What they are looking for in that summary is “the story,” a basic narrative
construct that they can easily wrap their minds – and the available factual evidence –
around. Usually they don’t care whether they can scrupulously validate the assertions as
long as they have face plausibility and the ideas are accepted or not contradicted within
their relevant community (or not blown out of the water by some competing meme). It is
the same with grant proposals, business plans presented to venture capitalists, sales
pitches, and communication with a busy legislator or bureaucrat.
Stories gain credence and are accepted as real the more they are embedded in cultural
artifacts and repeated by diverse sources in a person’s environment. The idea that
“universal service” meant cross subsidies to local telephone service and high cost areas,
and that such subsidies were mandated by the preamble of the 1934 Communications
Act, is a story invented by AT&T in the mid-1970s to serve as a legal weapon against
impending competition.1 Despite the fact that anyone who reads the actual record of the
1934 Act would find no evidence supporting this proposition, and plenty of evidence to
contradict it, the meme was by 1990 embedded in so many texts and oral lore that it had
1
In fact, the subsidies originated in the 1960s and were based on jurisdictional separations and settlement
procedures negotiated among state-level and federal regulators. See Mueller, Universal Service:
Competition Interconnection and Monopoly in the Making of the American Telephone System, MIT Press
1997.
acquired a stubborn reality. Many people clung to it even when confronted with the facts.
Of course, the refusal to abandon such myths is not just a product of cognitive factors, but
is political as well, for some narratives bolster or sustain political agendas and to abandon
them would weaken one’s case.
Narratives are socially constructed, which is to say they are human artifacts. In reality,
there is no such thing as a “policy issue” per se. There are only narratives which frame
objective evidence and put forward interpretations of real (or imagined) events in such a
way as to suggest that certain actions are or are not needed. Policy narratives define a
problem (it would be more accurate to say that they “problematize”), tell us something
about what caused the problem and suggest a solution. Some of the most powerful policy
narratives successfully define an interaction between exploitive bad guys and oppressed
good guys. Oftentimes, specific solutions or policies are implicit in how the problem is
narrated. Indeed, if one succeeds only in defining something as a problem that needs
rectification via state intervention, one has won half the battle. For example, in its
simplest form the “digital divide” story took the ordinary process of technological
diffusion and some obvious facts about economic inequality and made it into a policy
“problem.” Interestingly, there was nothing uniquely “digital” about the “digital divide.”
There were and continue to be major distributional disparities in analogue electronic and
even print technologies, not to mention housing, transportation, and health care. But what
a successful meme! There developed in its wake a virtual industry of digital divide policy
analysts that, as far as one can tell, has done little to accelerate the diffusion of
technology and user IT knowledge.
Which leads to my next point. One cannot speak scientifically of the policy process
without speaking of the groups or social actors (including policy entrepreneurs in
government) that seek to shape policy to suit their interests. Although debate and
dialogue about what policies are in the public interest are fruitful, there is no God-like
“Public” capable of intervening in the political process authoritatively to tell us what they
are. There is only a teeming mass of individuals and collectivities, all with different
perspectives, ideas, costs and benefits, all claiming that what’s good for them is good for
the USA. In a democratic polity, these interest groups compete to advance their own
interpretations about what is wrong, what needs to be done, and so on.
One of the fundamental constraints of policy making is that some participants in the
process are more powerful than others. Ergo, they have more ability to promote their own
narratives, fund idea development, define the range of acceptable alternatives, and so on.
If policy is strongly influenced by power and interest, the impact of scientific research is
reduced insofar as it conflicts with those interests.
There is another constraint that limits the susceptibility of policy definition to academic
research, and that is time. The opportunity to influence major legislative and policy
decisions is time-bound. A window of opportunity opens only for a while, and once it has
closed it is difficult, although not always impossible, to reopen it. Thus, any researcher
who would step into the policymaking process and influence the outcome must become
synchronized with the specific procedures of the relevant community and intervene at a
strategic moment when the possibilities still exist. Unless one makes tracking legislative
and regulatory processes one’s full-time job, it is not easy to do that.
To summarize, I have tried to identify four basic constraints pertinent to any attempt to
connect scholarly research with public policy:
a) Simplifying narratives drive policy formation
b) Competing stories are advanced by interested social actors seeking influence
c) The playing field is not level; truth takes a back seat to political influence
d) Timing is critical; intervention must take place within a specific window of
opportunity if it is to have an impact
Taken together, these are somewhat harsh constraints for scholarly research. My paper
suggests that we can forge a stronger link between research and policy by targeting
critical research at prevailing policy narratives. Research is at its most powerful with
respect to policy construction when it contradicts or challenges an established, influential
narrative. It can be even more influential when it bolsters a new story told by one of the
contending interest groups in the policy process.
Of course, in this approach the closer research gets to policy the less “neutral” it
becomes. Policy researchers who participate in this manner have to, in some sense, take
sides. This does not mean that they must abandon objectivity regarding the validity of
evidence, the use of rigorous methods, the logical relationships between evidence and
conclusions, and so on. It does mean that they abandon the pretense of neutrality, for if
they are influential whatever they do is likely to harm some players relative to others in
the policy game.
The paper will propose four distinct strategies for connecting research and policy:
1. Recognize policy discourse and the policy process itself as a subject of research
2. Critically investigate the validity of dominant narratives, which implies greater
emphasis on historical modes of investigation
3. Place scholars into policy making processes and put policy makers into the midst
of scholars
4. Support strategic monitoring capabilities
1. The first idea is to recognize policy discourse and the policy process in ICTs itself as
a subject of research. This kind of research can already be found in some political
science departments and more commonly in Communication schools. Frankly, most
of the latter would not be taken seriously by policymakers. The problem is that most
Communication researchers are content to statically describe the workings of
rhetorical constructs in policy processes as a kind of semiotic exercise. They fail
(indeed, they often lack the ability) to link the rhetorical interactions to real interest
groups and to real institutional processes and economic/political constraints. So if this
kind of work is to be supported in the future, it needs to meet much higher standards
of interdisciplinarity, fusing communicative awareness of the contending narratives
with knowledge of political economy.2 We need to know more about how policy
ideas in ICT diffuse, how various kinds of institutional frameworks for interaction
among interest groups constrain outcomes, and so on. Cross-national comparative
research seems to be particularly useful here.
2. Option 2 is to support empirical and constructivist challenges to the logical
implications of various narratives. While this may sound like a call for standard
empirical “tests” it is not as conventional as it sounds, for two reasons. One is that it
requires the challenger (i.e., the researcher) actually to be aware of what stories are
driving policy, which is often not the case. If researchers don’t take dominant and
influential narratives as their starting point, they may fail to close the gap between
research and policy because the policy world will not readily appreciate the relevance
of the findings. Second, it implies greater emphasis on historical modes of
investigation. What we usually see in policy narratives are invented historical
mythologies – golden ages from which we have regressed, claimed successes from
the past that validate certain policies, or claimed failures that discredit certain
policies. The word “narrative” itself implies sequence, process, history. Yet the social
actors who propose policy stories are rarely well informed historically. Policy
researchers are rarely historical in orientation, and the funders of policy-relevant
research rarely view history as relevant. To be sure, few historians are aware of how
history is put to use in the contemporary policy discourse, so I am not advocating the
movement of policy research into History departments. I am, rather, arguing for
supporting a capacity to critically examine the implied historical claims of current,
prevailing policy narratives. This of course implies independent empirical research
subject to the most rigorous standards, not the kind of “selecting bits of historical data
that confirms what you already think” activity that typically passes for historical
investigation in the policy world. We need people who have traced systematically the
history of IT policy formation over longer terms than the ordinary politician or policy
researcher. We might be surprised at how often policy themes regarding information
and communication, which we think are unique to our “information age,” recur. And
“historical” does not necessarily mean “prior centuries.” Following the classical
rhetorical tradition we can define narration as outlining the history of a problem,3
however far back the problem goes, thereby setting its interpretive context. For
example, a specific quasi-historical interpretation of the origins of the Internet
Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority
(IANA) played a major role in shaping policy makers’ views toward Internet
governance issues. The “history” involved here was only a couple of decades old.
3. Another approach is to find creative ways to cross-fertilize the worlds of academic
ICT policy research, ICT-related social research and the world of actual policy
makers. An example might be to support research and researchers who can
anthropologically enter policymaking milieus, and be encouraged to identify the
prevailing narrative at work and expose the policy environment to alternative
Aha! you may be thinking, I have pulled off the oldest academic’s trick in the book, using our own
ignorance and inability to affect the real world as a justification for more support. Guilty as charged.
3
McCloskey (1994) cites A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms (1991, 10), which defines “narration” as “the
second part of a six-part classical oration. It gives the audience the history of the problem.”
2
narratives. This participant-observer would, ideally, be someone familiar enough with
the relevant scholarly research to bring the policy makers into contact with empirical
data and alternative narratives. Admittedly, this may be a pipe dream. Given
fundamental constraint b) noted above, namely that the real source of policy-relevant
narratives are interested social actors (including the agencies themselves), real
decision making authorities are unlikely to permit mole-like independent analysts to
burrow about in their midst while they formulate difficult policies involving major
stakeholders and high stakes. But it would be really cool if they did. Perhaps with an
temporary embargo? The converse of this is to support consistent exposure of policy
makers and developers to policy relevant scholarship. Conferences like TPRC are
already doing precisely that, of course. Oddly, they have had trouble getting funding
lately.
4. The strongest form of influence might come when new areas of policy formation are
identified before, or just as, they become salient, providing a kind of “green field” for
the formation of policy narratives. Of course, this kind of activity becomes so
conjectural as to fall outside, or on the periphery of, scientific scholarship. It also
skirts constraint b) noted above.
The final paper will include more examples of how specific narratives are used in policy
discourse.