The stories groups tell: campaign finance reform and the narrative networks of cultural cognition

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to test whether groups with different cultural cognition orientations construct different stories about the same policy issue given the same information. We employed a focus group methodology to assemble participants with similar cultural dispositions and used the Narrative Policy Framework to examine the policy narratives that groups form about campaign finance. Our analyses indicate that the stories these homogeneous cultural groups tell associate political process concerns related to campaign finance to their core cultural values. Even when provided with the same information, the stories that the groups produced varied along theoretically consistent cultural dimensions. Our findings show the narrative cores displayed similar attribution of the problem to intentional human action; however we observed variation in the manner in which certain characters were assigned blame, and significant differences in the density of several of the narrative networks. We found that differences in presence of victims emerged along the grid dimension of cultural cognition with egalitarian narratives cores possessing victims, whereas hierarchist narratives did not. A difference that emerged along the group dimension of cultural cognition was the core narrative of individualist groups generated policy solutions, while communitarian narrative cores did not.

Developing Survey Methods for Collecting Individual Policy Narratives: A case study of climate change narratives using an engaged convenience sample

“…One potential reason for the complexity of climate change narratives may be the fact that climate change is what some have called a long-duration crisis (DeLeo et al, 2021). Similar to previous qualitative research using the NPF, we find that our climate change narratives reflect underlying belief systems about democracy and democratic norms (Gray & Jones, 2016;Smith-Walter et al, 2020) While our responses cannot match the depth of data provided by interviews, we believe that open-ended survey questions may be appropriate for collecting narratives with highly engaged samples. Doing so will save the researcher time as interviews will not need to be recorded and transcribed and data will already be in text format.…”

“…Related research by Shanahan, McBeth and Hathaway (2011) finds that narratives can strengthen policy preferences when congruent with previous preferences and can persuade preferences in the opposite direction when incongruent; however, this experiment only considered two different narrative treatments and had no non-narrative control. democratic values and belief systems can be observed in the narratives that people proffer when asked (Gray & Jones, 2016;McMorris et al, 2018;Smith-Walter et al, 2020).…”

The State and the Citizen: Overview of a complex relationship from a paradigmatic perspective

“…The impact of the narratives on polity and governance research (Smith-Walter et al 2020 ) along with big data, data mining and machine learning techniques (Takikawa and Sakamoto 2020 ), text, content, and discourse analysis, web semantics, and the increasingly complex emotional phenomenology generating huge amounts of data in social media, especially in the socializing networks, have provided support for the fast development of polity research—an issue which has been extensively addressed in a special issue on interdisciplinary research methodologies employed lately in political culture research methodologies (Voinea and Neumann 2020 ).…”

Thinking outside of the lunchbox: A narrative policy framework analysis of school lunch policies

“…Subjects were asked to complete a physical survey containing a series of 12 randomly ordered statements. Similar to an NPF and cultural cognition study conducted by Smith‐Walter et al (2020), for each response, the participants were asked to place themselves on a scale from 1 to 3, where 1 is disagree , 2 is neutral , and 3 is agree . Each measure of the four CT narrative types is a summation of three questions corresponding to each CT type.…”