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The Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) has influenced a generation of policy scholars with its emphasis on causal drivers, testable hypotheses, and falsification. Until recently, the role of policy narratives has been largely neglected in ACF literature partially because much of that work has operated outside of traditional social science principles, such as falsification. Yet emerging literature under the rubric of Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) demonstrates how the role of policy narratives in policy processes is studied using the same rigorous social science standards initially set forth by Paul A. Sabatier. The NPF identifies theories specifying narrative elements and strategies that are likely useful to ACF researchers as classes of variables that have yet to be integrated. Examining this proposition, we provide seven hypotheses related to critical ACF concepts including advocacy coalitions and policy beliefs, policy learning, public opinion, and strategy. Our goal is to stay within the scientific, theoretical, and methodological tradition of the ACF and show how NPF's empirical, hypotheses, and causal driven work on policy narratives identifies theories applicable to ACF research while also offering an independent framework capable of explaining the policy process through the power of policy narratives. In doing so, we believe both ACF and NPF scholarship can contribute to the advancement of our understanding of the policy process.
KEY WORDS: Narrative Policy Framework, Advocacy Coalition Framework, policy stories, policy narratives, policy processes, coalitions, policy change, learning, public opinion
Introduction
The Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) (Jones & McBeth, 2010) centrally locates the role of policy narratives in the policy process. As an emerging policy framework,1 the NPF is informed by theories from a myriad of disciplines and academic fields (e.g., Riker, 1986; Sabatier & Jenkins-Smith, 1993; Schattschneider, 1960; Stone, 2002) to construct a holistic framework designed to accurately capture and describe policy narratives, while also employing these theories to provide testable hypotheses that allow for the accurate assessment of the influence of policy narratives on public opinion, policy change, and policy outcomes.2 The import of this framework, we hold, has been the inclusion of the component pieces of policy narratives - narrative elements and strategies - as classes of variables that serve as the basis for theory building and testing. To date, these elements are missing from empirical models...