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Achieving public participation is often a goal for public budgeting entities and yet in practice is difficult to accomplish. This study's purpose centers on three questions: how do public representatives interpret and define their democratic responsibilities; what are their insights regarding opportunities and barriers in participation-based budgeting; to what extent are these goals met? To address these questions, this research employs a case study of a public university budgeting committee; interviews of committee members were conducted; analyses result in a conceptual map of a participation-based budgeting process. Findings reveal that respondents 1) define their mission structurally and procedurally, 2) identify a need ethical behavior and leadership, and 3) recognize that democratic values such as participation and efficiency come into tension with one another. Being open and inclusive comes in the form of the citizen—public administrator dialectic, and it also requires intellectual, ethical and practical engagement with competing democratic values.

Achieving public participation often is a goal for public budgeting entities, but it is difficult to accomplish in practice. This study examines three questions: How do public representatives interpret and define their democratic responsibilities? What are their insights regarding opportunities for and barriers to participatory budgeting processes? To what extent are these goals met? To address these questions, this research employs a qualitative research strategy with a case study design of a public university budgeting committee. The findings reveal that respondents (1) define their mission structurally and procedurally, (2) identify a need for ethical behavior and leadership, and (3) recognize that democratic values such as participation and efficiency are in tension with one another. Being open and inclusive comes in the form of the citizen–public administrator dialectic and requires intellectual, ethical, and practical engagement with competing democratic values.

Although there are some general resources for citizens who are appointed or elected to local government boards, there is a clear need to develop comprehensive and context-specific training material to better prepare citizens for public service and board governance. This study details the development, delivery, and impact of a structured curriculum developed by the authors and used for citizen board training in Montana. The curriculum covers four key areas: (1) Foundations of governance (such as relevant statutes, including state constitutional provisions on the right to participate and right to know, and good governance principles); (2) effective meeting techniques, with a focus on procedural methods such as Robert's Rules of Order; (3) conflict management; and (4) leadership and team-building skills. Curricular materials include a detailed handbook, case study exercises, relevant handouts and worksheets, and Web based resources such as podcasts. At the end of the training, we asked participants to self-evaluate their level of change in terms of knowledge and behavior, using both print and online surveys with Likert-scale items and open-ended questions. We used the responses to measure the impact of the educational program; analysis showed a positive change in participants' knowledge and behavior as a result of the training. Strengths, challenges, and implications of the current training curriculum, as well as further program refinement and its delivery in various contexts, are presented and discussed.

The study of narratives in a variety of disciplines has grown in recent years as a method of better explaining underlying concepts in their respective fields. Through the use of Narrative Policy Framework (NPF), political scientists can analyze the role narrative plays in political discourse

The Science of Stories: Applications of the Narrative Policy Framework in Policy Analysis is the first comprehensive collection of Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) studies, a new framework that empirically examines the role of policy narratives in the policy process. The core theme of NPF, and hence the book, is that policy narratives shape policy processes through influences on public opinion, coalitional behavior, and cultures and institutions. The original elements of this volume that set it apart from other policy texts are (1) empirical accounts of the power of stories at different levels of analysis within the policy process; (2) studies examining both domestic and international policy arenas; and (3) an assessment of this book written Christopher Weible and Edella Schlager, two prominent policy process scholars who situate the NPF in the larger policy process literature. The Science of Stories is a desired text for graduate and undergraduate policy courses.

The Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) has influenced a generation of policy scholars with its emphasis on causal drivers, testable hypotheses, and falsification. Until recently, the role of policy narratives has been largely neglected in ACF literature partially because much of that work has operated outside of traditional social science principles, such as falsification. Yet emerging literature under the rubric of Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) demonstrates how the role of policy narratives in policy processes is studied using the same rigorous social science standards initially set forth by Paul A. Sabatier. The NPF identifies theories specifying narrative elements and strategies that are likely useful to ACF researchers as classes of variables that have yet to be integrated. Examining this proposition, we provide seven hypotheses related to critical ACF concepts including advocacy coalitions and policy beliefs, policy learning, public opinion, and strategy. Our goal is to stay within the scientific, theoretical, and methodological tradition of the ACF and show how NPF's empirical, hypotheses, and causal driven work on policy narratives identifies theories applicable to ACF research while also offering an independent framework capable of explaining the policy process through the power of policy narratives. In doing so, we believe both ACF and NPF scholarship can contribute to the advancement of our understanding of the policy process.

AbstractThe last decade has seen the rise of the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) as a valuable theoretical framework for advancing knowledge of the policy process. In this article, we investigate the NPF's "travel" capacities across geographies, political systems, policy fields, levels of analysis, methodological approaches, and other theories of the policy process. We assess these capabilities by reviewing extant research and mapping newly explored territories. While we find that the NPF embodies all necessary conditions to travel to different settings, the empirical applications remain largely confined to the U.S. and European contexts, environmental policy, the meso level of analysis, the use of content analysis of documents as a methodological approach, and only a few combinations with other theories of the policy process. Our findings indicate that the NPF can travel well. However, we call for further research to conceptualize the NPF's macro level, to replicate NPF scholarship beyond liberal democratic institutional contexts, and to affirm the framework's capacity to be generalizable in varied settings.