Narratives in an authoritarian environment: Narrative strategies, plots, and characters in Moscow’s public transport reforms debate

Abstract

This article draws on the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) to analyze the recent debates over Moscow's public transport policy. Despite a proliferation of NPF implementations in recent years, applications in authoritarian institutional settings remain rare. We seek to fill this gap by examining how the actors combine narrative strategies, characters, and plots to advocate their vision of public transport development in Moscow. To this end, this study tests NPF meso-level hypotheses on narrative strategies and their connections with plots and characters used in the context of Russian electoral authoritarian regime. The results show that the NPF hypotheses are applicable for the analysis of policy debates in an authoritarian context. While the governmental coalition uses an angel shift strategy-focusing on heroes, beneficiaries, and stories of control-to contain the scope of conflict, the opposing coalition implies a devil shift strategy with a specific attention to villains, victims, and different plots to expand the scope of conflict.

Social Identities in the Policy Process of Authoritarian Systems

“…Policy processes are less transparent, preferences are less publicly visible, and identification of political positions via media is limited by the government’s control over newspapers and television (Uldanov et al. 2021 ). Furthermore, political actors are less accessible for interviews than in political systems with transparency rules.…”

Public Policy Research—Born in the USA, at Home in the World?

“… 2021 ; Uldanov et al. 2021 ). Similarly, while most policies that apply the NPF remain centered on environmental policies, there is recent expansion to other policy domains (e.g., education).…”

Political conflicts and surprising policy outcomes in times of crisis

“…An important political challenge is the growing tension between democratic and populist actors and, relatedly, between embedded democracies and authoritarian states. At the intersection of these conflicts lies the subject of our first contribution: the development of public transport in Moscow (Uldanov et al, 2021). The interest of the paper is more general: it follows on from EPA's most recent special issue (Stauffer & Kuenzler, 2021) and uses the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) for an analysis of European policy processes.…”