Narrative Entanglement

Adam Brzezinski and Luis Garicano

No 20829, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: Politicians rarely acknowledge trade-offs between a policy’s economic and non-economic effects. We show that incentives to suppress such trade-offs also generate narrative entanglement: a shock to one policy dimension leads politicians to update their whole narrative bundle, even on unrelated dimensions, which shapes equilibrium policy. We test our theory by analyzing all speeches from the 9th European Parliament (2019–2024) with LLMs. We find entangled narratives across different policy domains, and show that following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine politicians adjusted narratives on both the economic and environmental effects of climate policy, in line with our theory.

Keywords: Narratives (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D91 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-cis, nep-ene and nep-env
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP20829 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:20829

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP20829

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().