ABSTRACT
Stories can play an important role in argumentative policy analysis, and policy analysts and planners can frame and conduct their arguments through stories of a certain sort. In one sense, this contention is hardly surprising. All of us commonly use stories to make and support arguments, and the close relationship between stories and arguments is embedded in the English language. When the King in Shakespeare’s Hamlet discusses the “argument” of the play presented by a traveling troupe of actors, modern readers have no trouble understanding that the King is referring both to the plot line of the play and to the play’s implicit claim that Hamlet’s uncle and mother killed his father to appropriate the throne.
