Public Political Narratives: Developing a Neglected Source through the Exploratory Case of Russia in the Putin-Medvedev Era
| Author | Edwin Bacon |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2011.00939.x |
| Published date | 01 December 2012 |
| Date | 01 December 2012 |
| Subject Matter | Original Article |
Public Political Narratives: Developing a
Neglected Source through the Exploratory Case
of Russia in the Putin-Medvedev Erapost_939768..786
Edwin Bacon
Birkbeck College, University of London
The place of narrative in political science is an issue that resurfaces with regularity,usually focusing on the questions
of generalisability,evidence and causality which lie at the heart of the discipline. Most such debate concerns the use
of narrative by political scientists.Far less attention has been devoted to the use of narrative by political actors, despite
its relative ubiquity. Even where such attention has been given, it concentrates less on the narrative per se,and more
on its performance and impact. However,the nature of public political narratives means that analysis of them facilitates
a holistic understanding of their narrators’ politics. A public political narrative consists of a sequential account given
by political actors connecting selected, specific developments so as to impose a desired order on them. Taking
contemporary Russia as an exploratory case, narrative analysis draws out the motivations, world view and inconsis-
tencies within the Putin-Medvedev regime. Recurring motifs and symbols identify the regime’s political prior ities,
explaining policy choices and revealing future concerns. Narrative has a predictive aspect, identifying likely policy
responses to unexpected events. Narratives capture time, and shifts in their temporalities indicate changes in
self-conceptualisation and political priorities. Temporal appropriations include or exclude particular agential and
causal explanations. The relationship between their plots and subplots represents a political signalling process.Public
political narratives provide temporally and spatially specific exceptionalist accounts,but their combinatory quality also
facilitates comparative analysis. The approach essayed here provides methodological generalisability,arguing that the
neglect of public political narratives merits correcting.
Keywords: narrative; Russia
The place of narrative in political science is one of those questions that resurface with
regularity in debates over the nature of the discipline. In Mark Bevir’s overview of the
development of Anglo-Amer ican political studies from the late nineteenth to the start of
the twenty-first centuries, narrative stands as the other to science. Bevir charts the decline
of narrative political studies to be replaced by the search for more generic, scientific and
predictive models, before positing a partial return of nar rative, albeit sceptical narrative
(Bevir, 2006). Attempts to reconsider narrative as a valid political science approach arose
around the turn of the current century, sparking debates about the relationship between
narrative and the questions of generalisability, evidence and causality which lie at the heart
of political science ( Bates, 1998; Bevir, 2006; Griffin, 1993; Lynch, 2005; Patterson and
Monroe, 1998). It is striking though that such debates focus exclusively on the use of
narrative by scholars.What they omit is the use of narrative by political actors themselves.
While scholars debate the relevance and rigour of narrative explanations, political actors
employ them habitually in communicating with the public. A good story can boost popular
support for a party, politician or regime, touching the populace in a more elemental and
powerful way than detailed, intellectually robust but dry-as-dust policy proposals. Surpris-
ingly, however, analyses of the public political narratives employed by political actors are
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doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2011.00939.x
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2012 VOL 60, 768–786
© 2012The Author.Political Studies © 2012 Political Studies Association
rare, and where they do exist, their focus tends to be less on the narrative per se, and more
on its performance and its impact on an audience (Alexander, 2011; Ku, 1999).
The central tenet of this article is that, given the wide use of public political narratives
in the political world, the lack of analysis of these as narratives merits attention, representing
a lacuna which can be addressed by the use of the tools of narrative analysis. Such an
approach facilitates a focus not so much on the narrative’s external reception, but rather on
its essential nature and what it reveals about its narrators. To know someone’s story is to
make sense of, explain or even predict their actions more accurately (Somers and Gibson,
1994, p. 61). The exploratory case presented here – the narrative employed by the present
Russian regime – illustrates how narrative analysis contributes to a holistic understanding
that is absent from overly atomised accounts of the regime’s policies. My aim is therefore
twofold: relatively narrowly,to analyse the public political narrative of the Putin-Medvedev
regime in Russia in order to draw out its motivations,world view and inconsistencies; more
broadly, to offer an example through this exploratory case of how the techniques of
narrative analysis provide explanatory, cr itical and predictive insights into a polity. The
article concludes by returning to the question of generalisability.
Narrative Analysis in Politics
There is a distinction to be drawn between the use of narrative explanations by political
scientists and the study of narratives themselves as used by political actors. Clear as this
distinction may appear when starkly stated,the movement away from narrative explanations
on the part of political scientists over the past several decades appears to have adversely
affected the study of narrative approaches more generally. Cecelia Lynch, in noting the
influence of narratives on how we perceive the world and construct moral norms ‘about
the way things were, are and should be’, emphasises too that some scholars, especially in the
United States, are suspicious of the role of narrative in positivist social science and objective
analysis (Lynch, 2005, p.158). Bevir’s account of the development of political studies over
the past century or so argues that an increasing focus on atomistic analytic approaches
‘broke up the continuities and gradual change of elder narratives by dividing the world into
discrete, discontinuous units’. Instead of developmental stories and their tellers, ahistorical
and impersonal typologies and constructs came to dominate. The modernist empiricist
approach rejected the unfolding story in favour of classification, correlation and function-
alism (Bevir, 2006,p. 588,p. 591).Without gainsaying the value or otherwise of this process
as a whole,from the perspective of the study of narrative, the increasing minimisation of the
role of historical development, contingency and agency is unhelpful.
The ‘perestroika debate’ in US political science in the early years of the twenty-first
century saw narrative discussed in terms of the quest for rigour and objectivity (Monroe,
2005), with the question raised of whether an overly prescriptive approach to method-
ological rigour obscures the unexpected and unstable elements of politics which narrative
more readily highlights (Lynch, 2005, p.158; Migdal, 2001, p. 24). Again, the notion that for
scholars to resort to narrative explanation is unscientific threatens to spill over into the idea
that the identification and study of narratives in the political world similarly lacks the
methodological capacity to deliver objective insight.While the ‘perestroika debate’ as a
whole revolved around the alleged dominance of quantitative over qualitative approaches in
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