Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Shiller’s presidential address at the 2017 annual meeting of the American Economics Association provided a reminder of the influence of compelling stories on economic behavior. His explanation of narrative economics included examples illustrating how a catchy story may influence consumers to change their purchasing or savings behavior en masse, or to support political strategies that can run counter to personal economic incentives. In this post-2016 election torpor, Shiller’s call for recognition of narrative context is timely. Public acceptance or rejection of evidence-based policy recommendations depend on their narrative translation and selling.

Recommendations for new policies (or incremental adjustment of current policy) start first with data, utilize rigorous methodology to evaluate alternative outcomes, and come to reasonable conclusions outlined in the policy recommendation. Someone else disseminates the findings and policy recommendations to politicians. If the policy is controversial, there must be the additional step of convincing the public as well. The gate is open, therefore, for others to promote, misinterpret, or misappropriate policy analysts’ work, translating the message in order to fit a particular political purpose.

Psychologists, cognitive linguists, and media communications scholars were, as would be expected, early researchers on this topic, and they articulate the storytelling of political and commercial persuasion as framing. Entman (1993, p. 55) writes that the frame is the selection of “aspects of perceived reality (to)…promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation.” Narrative economists have understood the importance of framing, but are mostly focusing at the story level – that is, what’s the story that will convince the public, as Wilson (1887) described: 1) this issue is a terrible problem and 2) the policy recommendation is the solution to this issue. Yet a significant body of research in cognitive linguistics and neuropsychology points toward an additional and fruitful level of analysis; the single words and phrases used to tell the policy story.

This paper explores framing on a more micro-linguistic level; the vital phraseology in disseminating the policy recommendation. Persuasion needs not only an appealing narrative setting and simple, easily understood ideas, but also catchy words that are easily accessed from memory. Catchphrases or slogans, if chosen well, will ring in the ears and make the story stick in the public memory bank long after the tweet or news headline is gone. Examples range from “working families” and “top 1%” to “welfare queens” and “death taxes.” This paper provides, therefore, an auditory analysis of economic policy spin in the US, with a particular focus on the slogans affecting policies creating or alleviating income and wealth inequality.