Policy narratives in parliamentary debates: approaches to analyzing narrative elements, functions, and strategies

Parliament is a place where competing narratives are voiced. This institution serves as a platform in the struggle to shape the political agenda and allocate public resources. The narratives at play include a plot, characters, references to current events and a moral of the story that points to a solution to a problem. The way they are framed and presented can influence the setting of political priorities, the allocation of responsibilities and the formulation of solutions. By examining their use in parliamentary debates, we can reveal how consensus is built or destroyed among parliamentarians, and how discursive monopolies that set the tone for the very format of discussion of actions or events are formed. This article examines approaches to the narrative analysis of the parliamentary process, explains the functions of political narratives in parliamentary debates, describes their significance for the formation of the political agenda, and highlights the main narrative strategies used in parliamentary debates.
Based on existing studies presented in foreign and Russian literature, this paper points out that the study of narratives used in parliamentary processes offers a functional framework for analyzing the polarization and politicization of issues on the agenda. It could help to identify established discursive monopolies and strategies of interaction between parliamentarians and different audiences on different categories of issues. By emphasizing the discursive nature of agenda-setting and meaning-making, as well as the role of narrative in parliamentary debates, an attempt is made to identify those basic narrative elements and strategies that can serve as a basis for creating tools to assess the quality of parliamentary processes and models of discursive intraparliamentary interactions.

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