There is increasing interest in the role of narratives in policy-making, as evidenced by the consolidation of the Narrative Policy Framework, a theory of the policy process whose overall aim is to explain how policy narratives influence policy outcomes. However, with the focus on only policy narratives, there is a risk of underestimating the relationship between the policy dynamics in a specific subsystem and the pursuit of consent in the political arena. To attract more scholarly attention to this relationship, this paper distinguishes between two types of narratives—the political narrative and the policy narrative. It focuses on how political leaders address the trade-off between the content of their political and policy narratives, not only adding analytical and theoretical leverage to the Narrative Policy Framework but also providing a fine-grained comprehension of the multilayered dynamics of narratives in politics. Our main assumption is that political leaders continuously address relationships and the eventual trade-off between their political narratives (the stories through which they shape the preferences of public opinion by proposing their general political vision) and their policy narratives (the stories they tell to shape the policy process and its outputs). The way leaders decide between these trade-offs can make a significant difference in terms of political and policy outputs. We test this assumption with a comparison of the use of narratives by the same political leader in labour and education policies in Italy.

人们越来越关注叙事在政策制定中的作用，正如叙事政策框架的巩固所证明的那样，这是一种政策过程理论，其总体目标是解释政策叙事如何影响政策结果。然而，如果仅关注政策叙述，则可能会低估特定子系统中的政策动态与在政治舞台上寻求同意之间的关系。为了吸引更多学术界关注这种关系，本文区分了两种类型的叙事——政治叙事和政策叙事。它侧重于政治领导人如何处理他们的政治和政策叙述的内容之间的权衡，不仅为叙事政策框架增加了分析和理论影响力，而且还提供了对政治叙事的多层次动态的细粒度理解。我们的主要假设是，政治领导人不断地处理关系，并最终在他们的政治叙事（他们通过提出他们的总体政治愿景来塑造公众舆论偏好的故事）和他们的政策叙事（他们讲述的故事来塑造）之间进行权衡政策过程及其产出）。领导者在这些权衡取舍之间做出决定的方式可能会对政治和政策产出产生重大影响。我们通过比较同一位政治领导人在意大利的劳工和教育政策中使用的叙述来检验这一假设。