Interpreting crises through narratives: the construction of a COVID-19 policy narrative by Canada’s political parties
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As an unprecedent global crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic required policy actors to make sense of the event while simultaneously constructing an effective policy response. In this article, we focus on the onset of the crisis in Canada and ask: how was a crisis narrative constructed and to what extent did the features of the emergent narrative vary across political elites? We bring together the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) with Foucault’s ‘biopolitics of population’ to explain the construction of an initial crisis narrative that is consistent with the economic rationale of neoliberal governmentalities. Using an original collection of 1,331 Hansard statements from Canadian Members of Parliament during the first wave (March to June 2020), we employ inductive content analysis to assess elements of narrative form. This article contributes to broader work seeking to understand how various actors construct narratives around the crisis and the consequences of such narrativization for policy responses.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it