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03-05-2022 | Research Article

Space for stories: legislative narratives and the establishment of the US Space Force

Authors: Jonathan W. A. Ruff, Gregory Stelmach, Michael D. Jones

Published in: Policy Sciences | Issue 3/2022

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Abstract

In June 2018, President Trump directed the development of a sixth branch of the US Armed Forces—the Space Force—whose primary mission is to enhance the space operations of the USA and its allies. In this paper, we utilize the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) to examine legislative meso-level narratives surrounding the advocacy for and in opposition to the establishment of a US Space Force. After reviewing the literature on the NPF and US space-defense policy, we conduct a content analysis to discern the policy narratives within congressional testimonies encompassing the development of the Space Force. Included in this content analysis is a unique contribution to the NPF literature’s conceptualization of plot. Leveraging these data, we describe and analyze the policy narratives produced by Republicans and Democrats. Our main findings highlight significant partisan differences in the construction of narratives on the US Space Force, including contrasting viewpoints on the role of the Space Force, the setting of space as a domain of war, and military cooperation with commercial and international groups. We conclude with a discussion of the substantive implications of our findings, including the potential impacts of partisan narratives on the future role of the Space Force. Finally, we propose a new route to improve reliability in the study of NPF plots using a two-dimensional orientation to plot: policy outcome and time.

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Paragraph level coding was adopted in this piece to ensure we established rigorous intercoder reliability capable of passing a Krippendorf analysis through a diverse variety of spoken text. While other approaches such as word count coding (e.g., McBeth & Lybecker, 2018) may provide greater validity regarding the length of partisan testimonies, our approach in paragraph coding allowed flexibility in the interpretation of individual words or sentences contextualized to the full paragraph.

Shanahan et al., (2018b) recommends NPF researchers assess for intercoder reliability beyond percentage agreement. Hence, our use of Krippendorff’s (2004), a robust intercoder assessment tool, accounts for chance agreement (Krippendorff, 2004).

Given past partisan tendencies, the one independent in our data, Senator King (I-ME), is coded as a Democrat.

A robust description of the Codebook and example of the process used to code this research can be found in “Appendix 2” section.

Block quotes underneath each section header are intended to inform the reader of the type of content encoded for each category. Underlined phrases are key words used to identify differences between partisan narratives.

In this results section, we have italicized all coded narrative elements (parent nodes) and various subcodes (child and grandchild nodes).

These plot arc terms (i.e., future progress, lost control, independence) are based on Stone’s (2012) descriptions of plot (p. 158–168) and the concept of “mirroring.” As Stone describes plot mirroring, if there is a Story of Decline, there must be a Story of Rising. We have expanded that concept of mirroring to include the future, a Story of Decline, is mirrored by a Story of Future Decline and so forth.

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Title: Space for stories: legislative narratives and the establishment of the US Space Force
Authors: Jonathan W. A. Ruff
Gregory Stelmach
Michael D. Jones
Publication date: 03-05-2022
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Policy Sciences / Issue 3/2022
Print ISSN: 0032-2687
Electronic ISSN: 1573-0891
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-022-09455-5

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