Stories of how to give or take – towards a typology of social policy reform narratives

Narrative stories are crucial to policy change, as they decisively contribute to how policy problems and policies are defined. While this seems to apply for social policy in particular, narrative stories have remained under-researched and not systematically compared for this area. In this article, we theorise on narratives in social policy by focusing on how similarities and differences between narratives in old- and new-social-risks policy reforms can be conceptualised, taking into account expansion and retrenchment. To systematically link those types of social policy reform with narrative elements, we rely on stories of control and helplessness, as well as the deservingness or undeservingness associated with different target populations. Thereby, distinct types of social policy reform narratives are identified: stories of giving-to-give, giving-to-shape, taking-to-take, taking-to-control, and taking-out-of-helplessness. The article concludes with empirical illustrations of those narrative types, which stem from the case studies presented in this Special Issue.