The Role of Policy Narrators During Crisis: A Micro-Level Analysis of the Sourcing, Synthesizing, and Sharing of Policy Narratives in Rural Texas

by Mark C. Hand, Megan Morris, & Varun Rai

Policy researchers have done extensive research to understand the use of narratives in the policy process. We see that policymakers use narratives to set policy agendas, to emphasize issues, to suggest solutions, and much more. But how do policymakers respond to crisis?

Across numerous theories of the modern policy process, scholars have highlighted the importance of policy actors, or individuals that drive policy change. Scholars have variably defined these actors as policy entrepreneurs, policy stakeholders, policy brokers, and policy activists, with the distinctions across roles often blurry. Seeking a term that can span theories, some scholars have suggested the concept of the policy entrepreneur. While we share the goal of bridging theory, we argue that the fuzziness of this term limits our ability to detangle the diverse functions that policy actors serve.

We suggest a different method: What if we conceptualized a range of policy actors, each who serve distinct roles within each framework?

In our study, we propose a policy actor who can sit at the center of the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) specifically: the policy narrator. This actor, we argue, plays the unique role of composing narratives that weave political, social, and economic contexts and current events to present a distinct policy problem and call for a particular policy solution. 

To further conceptualize this actor’s role in the policy creation process, we use comparative case studies of seven oil-producing counties in one region of rural Texas that experienced two distinct crises in 2020: falling oil prices and mass rig closures following the spread of COVID-19.

Building on previous NPF work – as well as from narratology, entrepreneurship scholarship, and diffusion theory – we test four sets of propositions about how policy narrators source, synthesize, and share their policy narratives during times of crises. 

While we make multiple findings on narrative strategies (including surrounding the effectiveness of the devil-angel shift, narrative congruence, and the use of characters), we believe that our most important contribution is defining and situating a specific policy actor within the NPF. 

Our results support the idea that policy narrators create narratives with distinct, identifiable characteristics that can conceptually separate them from other policy actors. We argue that if we continue this honing of the characteristics, function, and strategies of actors across other policy process theories, we can start to build a common language that connects our understandings of how the policy process operates. 

You can read the original article in Policy Studies Journal at

Hand, M. C., Morris, M., and Rai, V.. 2023. “The role of policy narrators during crisis: A micro-level analysis of the sourcing, synthesizing, and sharing of policy narratives in rural Texas.” Policy Studies Journal, 51, 843–868. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12501

About the Authors

Mark C. Hand is an Assistant Professor in the Political Science department at the University of Texas at Arlington, where he researches employee ownership and workplace democracy, campaigns and elections, and theories of the policymaking process. 

Megan Morris is a Policy Manager at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at MIT. Megan manages the Gender sector and works on issues related to gender equity and women’s and girl’s agency. 

Dr. Varun Rai is the Walt and Elspeth Rostow Professor in the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, with a joint appointment in Mechanical Engineering. His interdisciplinary research, delving with issues at the interface of energy systems, complex systems, decision science, and public policy, develops policy solutions for a sustainable and resilient energy system. In 2016 he was awarded the David N. Kershaw Award and Prize. He received his Ph.D. and MS in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University and a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur.