Doctrinal symbolization and the political vernacular of narratives. What is changing in the public field?

The discursive diversity of public policy is constantly supported by a variety of symbolic structures used by the state, its partners and opponents, which formalize their political will in the form of various strategies, projects or individual actions. In modern conditions, with their characteristic uncertainty of the future and the volatility of their plans, political players, in an effort to increase the mobilization of the population, pay increasing attention to the communicative abilities of narratives that appeal to the mental characteristics of people, the ordinary level of their cultural orientations and everyday identification models. Compared with the doctrinal ways of symbolizing political goals and values, these narrative constructions retain significant advantages in interpreting and culturally decoding the meanings of political messages by people. Being a flexible and more accessible tool for the layman to purposefully influence a person’s awareness of the goals and values of the ruling regime, narratives extend not only to the public field, but are also actively used to convey meanings in intra-elite contacts, in which both status and informal coalitions of the ruling class participate. The widespread use of narratives inevitably leads to changes in the configuration of public discourse. At the same time, the methods of mass consciousness management are being updated both in countries of democratic deliberation and in states demonstrating various forms of authoritarian domination. The popular “concept of political narratives” (NPF), offering an essentialist interpretation of political narratives, introduces into the analysis a number of tools that allow to specify their place and role in the space of discourse, as well as to show the features of their application in the management of public communications of the state and society, emerging at all levels of the political system. Moreover, these cognitive constructions help to see certain trends in the evolution of the field of politics as a whole. Thus, modern realities clearly demonstrate that narrative politicians consistently strengthen the advantages of ruling regimes and lead to the solidification of manipulative forms of government, consistently expanding the mechanisms of political dominance hidden from society and shielding citizens from the levers of distribution of key public resources.