Structure, Valence, and Causality: A Scoping Review of Plot Concepts and Measurements in the Narrative Policy Framework
2025-08-08
The Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) has grown in popularity as a policy process framework that centralizes narratives as a primary means to communicate policy preferences. In the NPF, key components of policy narratives (including Settings, Characters, Morals of the Story, and Plot) are defined and operationalized by scholars seeking insight on narrator construction, dissemination, and interpretation of policy stories. The plot component has been a particularly difficult concept to define and operationalize consistently in narrative research. This article uses a scoping review approach to capture NPF definitions of plot and synthesize them within three conceptual boundaries: plot is inclusive of a policy narrative's structure of action, the valence of action, and the causality of action. It then describes various NPF operational approaches to plot and distinguishes them along the boundaries of plot: structure (a measurement of narrative sequence), valence (a measurement of narrative polarity), and causality (a measurement of narrative explanation). The article concludes with a discussion of how these boundaries can serve as a shared language in policy narrative scholarship to describe the concept and communicate NPF empirical applications of plot reliably.