Narratives in an authoritarian environment: Narrative strategies, plots, and characters in Moscow’s public transport reforms debate

This article draws on the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) to analyze the recent debates over Moscow's public transport policy. Despite a proliferation of NPF implementations in recent years, applications in authoritarian institutional settings remain rare. We seek to fill this gap by examining how the actors combine narrative strategies, characters, and plots to advocate their vision of public transport development in Moscow. To this end, this study tests NPF meso-level hypotheses on narrative strategies and their connections with plots and characters used in the context of Russian electoral authoritarian regime. The results show that the NPF hypotheses are applicable for the analysis of policy debates in an authoritarian context. While the governmental coalition uses an angel shift strategy—focusing on heroes, beneficiaries, and stories of control—to contain the scope of conflict, the opposing coalition implies a devil shift strategy with a specific attention to villains, victims, and different plots to expand the scope of conflict.