Time's Sentimental Tale: Operationalizing Plot Within the Narrative Policy Framework

ABSTRACT The Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) has proven to be a successful analytical tool for examining the role of narratives within the policy process; however, the analysis of plot is still understudied. This gap persists due to difficulty in developing valid and reliable measures of plot and a lack of plot operationalizations using longitudinal data. Inspired by Kurt Vonnegut's thesis on the shape of stories, this study explores the extent to which policy narratives assume a generalizable shape and how that shape can contribute to our understanding of the policy process. Using 2014–2020 news media coverage of Ghana's energy crisis, we reconceptualize plot as a temporal story arc captured through the media's affective evaluations of policy events, reflecting how the policy problem is framed across time. To achieve this, we apply sentiment analysis to news media coverage of policy events and aggregate them into a sentiment score. This score is then plotted over time to visually depict the shape of Ghana's energy crisis story. Our results reveal that this shape closely mirrors Vonnegut's Man in Hole story, suggesting that policy narratives may adhere to generalizable story arcs. Theoretically, these results contribute to our understanding of time and sentiment within the NPF, opening avenues for future research. Methodologically, this paper provides an empirical blueprint for capturing and coding plot variables in a reliable and replicable manner.