The performance of political narratives: How Australia and Britain’s ‘fat bombs’ fizzled out
| Author | John Boswell |
| DOI | 10.1177/1369148116630232 |
| Published date | 01 August 2016 |
| Date | 01 August 2016 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2016, Vol. 18(3) 724 –739
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1369148116630232
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The performance of political
narratives: How Australia and
Britain’s ‘fat bombs’ fizzled out
John Boswell
Abstract
Although narrative has become an important concept in political analysis, the empirical focus
has largely been limited to narrative as text. This article puts equal emphasis on narration as act.
Drawing on tools and techniques associated with performativity, I analyse how actors perform a
critical counternarrative on obesity as a policy issue across democratic settings in Australia and
the United Kingdom. I show that this political narrative is watered down, muted and confused the
closer it gets to formal governing institutions; this avowedly ‘cohesive narrative’ becomes fuzzy,
inconsistent and overlapping, such that the ticking ‘fat bomb’ described in open public debate
fizzles out before it even approaches these institutions. In concluding, I argue that these findings
add considerable nuance to our understanding of how and to what effect narrative manifests in
political affairs.
Keywords
health policy, narrative, obesity, performativity
Introduction
‘Narrative’ has become a fashionable term in political life. Media analysts and political
actors themselves talk sagely about the importance of ‘controlling the narrative’ over any
complex and contested issue and work accordingly to construct the narratives that make
sense of and order political affairs (Boswell, 2013). This trend follows burgeoning poli-
tics and policy scholarship which has highlighted how narratives give shape to percep-
tions of political problems (see Ospina and Dodge, 2005). But within both realms—political
practice and empirical political scholarship—attention has largely been on narrative as
text. Instead, I build on the notion, elucidated at length by narrative theorists across the
subfields of political science and beyond (e.g. Stone, 2002; White, 1980),1 that political
narratives do not exist simply as discursive artefacts. They consist of live ‘acts’ in that
they must be reproduced and reinterpreted in, and for, specific contexts. Observing how
University of Southampton, UK
Corresponding author:
John Boswel, University of Southampton, Highfield Campus, Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK.
Email: j.c.boswell@soton.ac.uk
630232BPI0010.1177/1369148116630232The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsBoswell
research-article2016
Article
Boswell 725
narratives are brought to life in different political settings is crucial to developing a better
understanding of narratives and their impact on politics and policy.
My analysis entails a rich case study of debate on the complex and contested political
issue of obesity in Australia and the United Kingdom. It focuses on the key counternarra-
tive on the issue in particular, labelled so as it represents the primary opposition to the
dominant narrative affirming the status quo. This is the Regulatory Reform narrative,
voiced mainly by public health academics, sympathetic media commentators and health
charity representatives, which blames rising rates of obesity on the spread of ‘junk food’
diets and supports much stricter regulation of the food industry. By innovatively allying a
more traditional narrative analysis to an appreciation of performativity, I track the way
this narrative moves across political debate in the two countries, contrasting its perfor-
mance in settings in the public sphere with those approaching formal governing institu-
tions. I find that this narrative is watered down, with its emotional force blunted and its
specific details fudged, as actors perform it in these institutions, to the point where its
coherence across either debate is highly questionable. These findings reveal a complex
role for narrative in political affairs, suggestive of a more nuanced understanding of nar-
rative in empirical political analysis.
The article proceeds in four main sections. In the first, I explore in greater detail the
conceptual underpinnings of the empirical research, whereby narrative is seen to be
something comprising live acts rather than a dead text to be outlined by the analyst. In the
second, I outline the approach I took to analyse narration in this way. In the third, I outline
the analysis in two main parts, first describing how the counternarrative on obesity is nar-
rated in open, public sites, before showing how it becomes watered down, muted and
confused in formal governing institutions. In the final section, I conclude by highlighting
what these findings imply for the study of political narrative more generally.
Narration as act
In the last three decades or so, there has been a surge of enthusiasm for talking about and
studying narrative in political scholarship. Like most concepts across social scientific
endeavour, its swelling popularity has also entailed a degree of concept stretching or slip-
page. At one end of the spectrum, narrative is seen as synonymous with anecdote, an
everyday recounting of a specific sequence of events. At the opposite end, narrative is
synonymous with what is more commonly called discourse, as a broad ensemble of ideas
and symbols that order actors’ understanding of social and political affairs, usually beyond
their own apprehension. There is extensive work across the social sciences, and in politics
and policy scholarship particularly, that theorises about, and makes empirical use of, nar-
rative in these senses of the term (as outlined in Boswell, 2013). But the dominant usage
of narrative in empirical politics and policy scholarship, which I also adopt here, sits in
between these conceptions. Although, of course, it cannot be completely distinguished
from them—developed as it is, in part, as an accretion of anecdotes (Ospina and Dodge,
2005) while at the same time as a ‘surface textual’ manifestation of a deeper underlying
discourse (Schram, 2012)—narrative in this sense is a chronological account that helps
actors to make sense of, and communicate about, a political issue (Fischer, 2003: 162;
Roe, 1994: 1–4; Stone, 2002: 138).
Most of the empirical work adopting this notion in politics and policy studies has been
either on uncovering the content of narratives on specific policy controversies (e.g.
Boswell et al., 2011) or on identifying how political actors construct narratives to gain
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