Policy Narratives, Religious Politics, and the Salvadoran Civil War: The Implications of Narrative Framing on U.S. Foreign Policy in Central America

This dissertation project intends to advance the understanding of the American public policy process by employing the Narrative Policy Framework. Over the past decade, the NPF has emerged within public policy scholarship as an empirical, positivist, and structural analysis offering explication of the role policy narratives play in the public policy system. Recently, the NPF has been combined with the theoretical and methodological analysis of the Advocacy Coalition Framework. It is from such grounding that this project endeavors to test whether and how policy narrative tactics were deployed by American religious advocacy coalitions to influence elite decision and action regarding U.S. foreign policy in El Salvador during its civil war. This dissertation project proffers three testable hypotheses; to examine each, content analysis is conducted upon 225 public consumption documents produced from two competing religiously-oriented advocacy coalitions (the Religious Right coalition and the Progressive Christian coalition) and a general religious-interest search. The results indicate statistically significant differences between the two coalitions for their utilization of both policy narrative beliefs and policy narrative strategies. Ultimately, as the NPF has expanded to include the study of coalition behavior, the study of policy narratives continues to offer a meaningful opportunity in which to better understand the power of narrative within the American public policy system.