Economic Policy Narratives: A Taxonomy and Application

This article discusses how economic policy narratives can be framed as part of the study of policy formation based on insights from an emerging literature. We offer a taxonomy that distinguishes between causal and moral policy narratives. We analyse how the political success of policy narratives depends on alignment with the interests of voters and is influenced by motivated reasoning. We then show how large language models can be used to study policy narratives through an application to narratives on the size of government voiced in the UK House of Commons over 1950–2023.