When narratives fail (and why): explaining policy narrative effectiveness in crisis

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic confronted policymakers with extraordinary uncertainty and pressure to make and justify urgent decisions. Among the tools used to navigate this complex context, policy narratives played a key role in shaping how problems and solutions were publicly framed. Through qualitative coding and process tracing, this article examines how policy narratives shaped school policies in Italy during the crisis, with a focus on the effectiveness of rhetorical strategies in securing preferred outputs. Using the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF), the study analyzes public statements by key governmental actors and compares their narrative strategies with the decisions ultimately implemented. The findings show that non-rhetorical strategies predominated and were more effective than rhetorical ones. Notably, the only instance in which the adopted policy diverged from the preferred one occurred when rhetorical strategies prevailed. The analysis suggests that, in times of crisis, narrative effectiveness depends less on rhetorical appeal and more on alignment with the crisis trajectory, consistency with scientific advice, and the narrator's reputation. The article advances a contextualized model of narrative effectiveness, integrating these factors into the NPF to better explain narrative success and failure in crisis policymaking.