This book is written in an effort to understand the multifaceted and dynamic role narratives play in politics in general, and in Turkish politics in particular. Narratives play crucial roles in politics and open fruitful areas of research. Narratives help us comprehend separate phenomena by weaving them into a comprehensible web of relationships. They turn ‘temporally distributed events into interpretable wholes’ (Wertsch 2000, 515). Narratives also reduce the number of possible interpretations of events by emplotting them in a certain way (Ewick and Silbey 1995, 213; Wertsch 2000, 515), and they give stories a sense of reality due to the common-sense properties of their truth claims (Bridger and Maines 1998). Narratives do not only help us comprehend the world but also our place within it. As Somers (1994, 625) maintains, identity formation takes shape within ‘relational settings of contested but patterned relations among narratives, people, and institutions’. In addition to making sense of our lives and ourselves in narrative form (Taylor 1989; Brockmeier 2002), we also express and transmit our ideas through narratives. Political narratives are key to our understanding of the role of ideas in politics as they are the vessels through which ideas are carried.

As Polletta (1998) points out, narratives can serve us better in understanding political communication than other discursive communication units such as frames or discourses for a number of reasons. Narratives have a temporarily configurative capacity, they rely on emplotment rather than explanation and they tend to be more vague, leaving room for personal interpretation and actually requiring our interpretative participation to ‘fill the gaps and resolve the ambiguities’. Relatedly, while the success of frames depends on how credible, logical and explanatory they are, narratives rely on ‘emotional identification and familiar plots rather than on testing or adjudication of truth claims’ (Polletta 1998). The temporal dimension and sense of movement also distinguishes narrative from discourse and frame (Miskimmon, O’Loughlin and Roselle 2013, 7). As Ewick and Silbey (1995, 200) argue, the temporal and structural ordering inherent in narratives ‘ensure both “narrative closure” and “narrative causality”: in other words, a statement about how and why the recounted events occurred’.