The Tell-Tale Heart of Political Science: Literal vs. Metaphorical Use of Narrative in Analysing Power Relations

Judging by their current uses in policy analysis, the merits of notions such as ‘policy narrative’ and ‘meta-narrative’ seem to reside more in their evocative or suggestive character than in any capacity to “tell a story”. Narratives constructed by political scientists mostly have a representational content that bears little similarity with what narratology as a discipline studies. Breaking up with this metaphorical use, we propose to take the storytelling dimension of policy narrative more seriously, ie. more literally. Though narratives proved useful in understanding the articulation of discursive patterns and power struggles in policy processes, we think it paradoxically failed to provide a consistent analysis of what is at stake when agents and institutions get “entangled in stories” (to take the expression of German phenomenologist Wilhelm Schapp). What would happen to policy narratives if, according to the strictly technical, narratological sense of the word, we suddenly turned actors and agents into “characters”, who get transformed through a series of trials and tests? Similarly, if we restored the notion of perspective (what narratologists call ‘focalization’), what would be the consequence for the policy analyst to be envisaged as a narrator?