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Now that the election has been called, here is my narratological analysis of the latest Conservative and Liberal TV ads about Stephen Harper. The key hypothesis of narratological analysis is that a message is more convincing if it presents a coherent narrative, namely a series of events unfolding over time. As the campaign itself unfolds, we will see which messages resonate most with the electorate.

The Conservatives’ is a feel-good ad and the Liberals’ an attack ad. Each will appeal to the party’s core supporters and alienate the other party’s. The question is how they will be perceived by those who are currently undecided.

The Conservative ad, titled simply “Stephen Harper” is available at conservative.ca on the TV ads page. It runs for a minute, is narrated by Harper himself, and presents 19 full-colour images. The first 6 images are patriotic: the flag, a flypast over Parliament Hill, a child with a face-paint maple leaf, an elderly ethnic couple, the eternal flame on Parliament Hill, and finally two fighters jets escorting a passenger jet.

The next 11 images are of Harper, grouped into four consecutive themes:

• As patriot (visiting war memorials in images 7 and 9),

• at work (in his office in image 8, visiting a construction site in image 10 and a factory in image 11),

• as international statesman (at the G20 summit in image 12, with Mexican President Felipe Calderon – a curious choice, because even if Obama and Berlusconi are too controversial, Sarkozy, Merkel, or Cameron are higher profile – in image 13, and waving as he boards his jet in Korea in image 14)

• as family guy, with his wife and kids (image 15), with a child (image 16), and playing the piano at home (image 17).

The penultimate image is a crowd cheering, and the last image Harper again with the Conservative slogan “here for Canada” superimposed.

This ad fits perfectly into the heroic national renewal-protagonist growth quadrant of the public management narrative that I presented in my post of March 7. Harper’s words begins in synch with the patriotic images (“we’re lucky to live in Canada … a country that is a symbol of freedom, democracy, and opportunity”). Then his national renewal narrative – “we’ve been through a lot these past couple of years; the whole world has, but we’re doing it our way, the Canadian way … today our country is walking taller, standing prouder, getting stronger” – is blended with the images (10 and 11) of him in hardhat overseeing economic renewal, and the images of his personal progression to international statesman (12, 13, and 14).

The final part of the speech – “our best days are yet to come, together as Canadians let’s strengthen our country, and make it better for families, and ensure our kids have more opportunities than we did” – and the family images (15, 16, and 17) take the viewer back down from the lofty plane of international statesmanship to the family guy and the pitch to the Conservatives’ core constituency.

Conclusion: it’s a very carefully-crafted ad, not only combining patriotic appeal and messages aimed at the Conservatives’ target voters, but doing it within a coherent story. However, its exploitation of patriotic sentiment for a partisan political purpose could alienate some voters if they consider it shameless exploitation.

The Liberal ad, entitled, “Abuse of Power,” ran as a banner on Liberal.ca last week and is now available under Liberal Party of Canada on YouTube. It is 30 seconds long and narrated by an anonymous and urgent, even panicky, female voice. For images there are six black-and-white newspaper stories about Conservative abuses, also containing unflattering photos of Harper. The narrator begins with the words, “Stephen Harper: he’s gone too far” over Harper’s silhouette. It then goes quickly through four episodes of abuse of power: refusing to fire Minister Oda for misleading Parliament, shrugging off charges that could lead to jail time against his inner circle for breaking election laws, shutting down Parliament (prorogation), and relabeling the Government of Canada the Harper Government.

The ad then displays the words Abuse, Deceit, and Contempt, each accompanied by the bang of a gavel. These are superimposed over a particularly nasty image of Harper, looking like a cross between a carnival huckster and a party boss (Broderick Crawford in All the King’s Men). The narrator concludes “Harper thinks he’s above the law,” and provocatively asks “is this your Canada or Harper’s?”

The ad is without doubt a hard-hitting critique of the Harper government along the lines of what the Liberals have long signaled would be a major component of their election messaging. The question is whether undecided voters will shrug it off as being about inside baseball on Parliament Hill, with no impact on their daily lives.

It also lacks a story line. It doesn’t put this abuse of power in any historical perspective. There are two story lines the ad might have used. The first is “the leopard doesn’t change his spots” story, digging up some historical evidence that Harper has always been a hyper-partisan, so that having gone too far now is simply indicative of the man’s basic character from way back.

The second is the “power corrupts” story. The ad could have reminded the viewer of the Conservative’s vaunted Accountability Act, and then showed how Harper’s behavior over the last few years has contradicted the act, rendering him a hypocrite.

The ad criticizes Harper’s behavior; an ad with a stronger story line would criticize his character. It may be that the Liberals don’t want to go this far, but the Conservative attack ads about Michael Ignatieff attack his character.

In my next post, I will look for the narratives contained in the Liberal and Conservative ads about Michael Ignatieff.

I have been thinking about energy policy – a field in which I claim no expertise – as the ongoing catastrophe unfolds at the Fukushima nuclear reactor. The quandary is that, as Jeff Sommer argues in an article in the New York Times on Sunday March 20 entitled “A Crisis that Markets Can’t Grasp,” markets have not succeeded in putting a price on the long-run costs associated with disposing of nuclear waste (the best case) or of dealing with nuclear disasters (the worst).

It is clear to me that the nuclear industry has underestimated the risks and, as a consequence, failed to invest sufficiently in risk mitigation. What would nuclear energy cost in Japan if its plants were built to a standard secure enough to resist a magnitude 9 earthquake and resulting tsunami? If plants had to be built to that standard, would Japan have invested very much, or even anything, in nuclear energy?

Similarly, the Times article referred to the $ 6 billion nuclear power plant built at Shoreham, Long Island, and decommissioned in 1989 before ever going into operation. The key argument in public opposition was the impossibility of evacuating populated areas of Long Island in the event of a nuclear disaster.

To make intelligent energy policy decisions, we need to compare alternative energy sources in terms of their capital cost, operating cost, ongoing environmental impact, and potential for, and impact of, catastrophes. Nuclear energy now looks much worse in terms of either the latter factor or the cost of mitigating it. The immediate reactions of newspaper columnists – the predictable first draft of history – do not in any quantitative sense deal with those complexities. As the Fukushima story plays out – and it will certainly be a long-running story – we’ll begin to get a sense of more realistic costs and tradeoffs than have been estimated in the past.

A personal note on the Japanese story. An article in the New York Times assessing the role of the Japanese government in reacting to the crisis quoted Masahiro Horie, a former senior government official who is now a dean at Japan’s National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies. The name seemed familiar, and indeed it turned out that I had interviewed Mr. Horie – then a budget examiner in the Ministry of Finance – twenty five years ago for an article I wrote about public management in Japan (“Management of the public sector in Japan: are there lessons to be learned,” in Canadian Public Administration, summer 1986, pp. 175-96). Mr. Horie was particularly forthcoming and helpful with my research then, and I vaguely recall not only an interview in his office, but also a restaurant lunch.

He and I re-established contact by email. In his view, the “strong social cohesion, solidarity, and mutual assistance” of the Japanese people will enable them to “overcome these difficult times and stand up again.” I certainly hope he’s right.

This was a political maxim Liberal strategist Jim Coutts told my public management class on a visit several years ago. Tit for tat. Continuing from last week’s post, this is not the strategy the Liberals are following as they choose not to respond to the Conservatives’ attack ads. Perhaps they simply don’t have the money to market test, produce, and air the ads, or even to post them online.

Michael Ignatieff has taken the position that he won’t dignify the attacks on his integrity with a response. This position is a well-known implicit narrative: I demonstrate that I’m the better man by not responding. By not responding, he’s denying additional attention to the attack ads. But he’s also leaving it up to the public to assess them.

Some voters will agree with Ignatieff that the ads are beneath contempt, but others will agree with the Conservatives that they reveal a sort of opportunism in Ignatieff that represents a serious character flaw.

If the Conservatives’ market testing reveals that these attacks work for a significant portion of the electorate, particularly swing voters, we can expect to see more of them during the campaign. It has also been darkly suggested that, given Ignatieff’s many televised utterances as a public intellectual, the most damaging ads are yet to come.

One can interpret Ignatieff’s most recent book, True Patriot Love: Four Generations in Search of Canada as an attempt to write a counter-narrative that responds to the Conservatives’ attack ads. The problem is that the initial hardcover ranks 49,325 on amazon.ca. Even if his publisher releases a paperback edition in time for the election campaign it will reach far fewer voters than televised ads.

Political campaigns – and governing – are about both policy and leadership. Policy is the easier of the two to discuss. Policy positions can be presented with some specificity and citizens can see policies put in place and affecting them. But leadership, defined as that set of intellectual and emotional traits that a politician brings to the job, matters enormously. The vast majority of voters have never met the party leaders, and only a few hundred have ever spent long enough interacting with them to have any in-depth understanding of their leadership styles. So what most of us know, or think we know, about party leaders – as leaders – comes from the media. We form our impressions from their speaking style, body language as glimpsed in short clips, or insider reports or gossip.

(Personal disclosure: I have never met Stephen Harper. I met Michael Ignatieff once, at a reception in Toronto for Harvard Kennedy School alumni. The Dean of HKS cancelled at the last minute and Ignatieff gave a graceful and eloquent speech in his absence, leading me to the limited conclusion that he handles the public component of academic leadership very well.)

I see attack ads that deal with a candidate’s character as a legitimate though imperfect element of political discourse. They attempt to talk about character weaknesses, though often using questionable evidence.

If the Conservatives are attacking Ignatieff’s character, then it is legitimate for the Liberals to attack Harper’s. Notice that Coutts didn’t say “if he says you’re fat, you say you’re thin.” There is a big difference between denying that you’re fat and saying that your opponent is bald.

The Conservatives’ narrative is that Stephen Harper has grown in stature as prime minister. The Liberals’ response would be to attempt to disrupt that narrative, to argue that he hasn’t grown in stature, that he’s still the “same old Harper” he was in his Reform Party and Canadian Taxpayers’ Foundation days. They could focus not only on his policies but on well-known aspects of his record as prime minister such as his controlling, autocratic, and secretive style of leadership. And they would also point out parallels with the past.

Whether the Liberals will do this when the campaign begins is another matter. But Jim Coutts was an awfully shrewd and successful political strategist.

In an excellent column on March 5, The Globe and Mail’s Jeffrey Simpson critiqued the federal Conservative’s attack ads by showing how Stephen Harper’s policy positions on health insurance, bilingualism, regional development, and proportional representation have changed, and then asking “what if the PM’s previous views were used against him?”

I will put Simpson’s point in a broader perspective to show how the Conservatives are developing narratives to be used in the next election campaign, whenever it comes. I start with the four quadrant public management narrative model that I used in my previous post to look at this year’s three Academy Award winning public sector narratives. The key point is that an effective public sector narrative includes both a narrative about a protagonist and a narrative about the polity.

The Conservatives’ narrative about themselves is situated squarely in the upper left quadrant. The key policy point they will make is that, under their leadership, the country weathered the challenge of the global economic recession and emerged with its economic institutions in relatively good shape. The Government of Canada ads about the Economic Action Plan are continually telling that story.

The second part of the narrative concerns Stephen Harper as protagonist. What is essential here is that it contains some component of personal growth and renewal. In this context, the Stephen Harper of the past that Simpson revisits is the starting point of the narrative. The evolution Harper has been trying to project for himself is that he is now less ideological and more pragmatic, a global statesman rather than a domestic politician, and at the personal level a mainstream middle-class piano-playing hockey dad. This is what we will see in the Conservative ads as soon as the writ is dropped.

This is a narrative arc straight out of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 2. Prince Hal was too much the party boy just as Stephen Harper was too much the Party’s boy, but both evolved.

The Conservative’s other narrative concerns Michael Ignatieff. They are using the attack ads, aired to the large audiences of the Superbowl, hockey games, and Academy Awards, to keep retelling a story of what would happen if Michael Ignatieff were PM. They are trying to place Ignatieff and the Liberals in the lower left quadrant of the public sector narrative model. That quadrant, remember, combines personal renewal for the protagonist with decline for the polity. The attack on his policy positions whether previous (carbon tax, higher GST) or current (no corporate tax cuts) is arguing that, economically, the polity would be worse off under his leadership.

The “just visiting” theme tells a story of personal ambition. Dredging up instances of Ignatieff speaking as the cosmopolitan intellectual, identifying with his adopted home whether the UK or the US, and slighting his Canadian origins, are as essential to the ads as the attack on his policy positions. Their message is that Ignatieff’s personal narrative has been one of distancing himself from Canada, disaffiliation and deracination. To attempt to return is evidence of inauthenticity, of ambition rather than patriotism. This message is premised on the assumption that Canadians don’t resent compatriots who’ve made it big overseas – Celine Dion or Malcolm Gladwell – but they most appreciate them if they stay overseas.

Judging by the public opinion polls, in particular the question about who would make the best leader, the Conservative’s narrative strategy is working very well. The personal narrative they have created for Michael Ignatieff, in the minds of much of the electorate, is sticking. They’ve positioned themselves on the high ground – squarely in the upper left quadrant – and forced the Liberals, and Michael Ignatieff especially, to the lower left quadrant. Whenever the election comes, the Conservatives will keep retelling these two stories.

It is unusual for three management narratives – The King’s Speech, The Social Network, and Inside Job – to win Academy Awards in one year. Why did they win, and does three wins in one year represent something more than serendipity?

Two of the three movies are products of the times. Inside Job dealt with the decade’s major economic crisis and Social Network with its major technological opportunity. The King’s Speech is not so topical, and was delayed so long after King George VI’s death because the family of his speech therapist Lionel Logue would not cooperate with screenwriter David Seidler until after the death of the Queen Mother in 2002. So it is somewhat serendipitous that it came out in a year where there already two good management narratives.

Why did each win? I won’t try to reconstruct why both the general public and the members of the Academy preferred these films to those with which they were competing. I will, however, start with my conceptual framework for understanding political or management narratives. It’s a four quadrant diagram, with the protagonist’s narrative arc on the horizontal axis and the narrative arc of the organization or polity in which the protagonist is located on the vertical axis. For both the protagonist and the organization/polity there are two possible outcomes, renewal or decline. So the upper left quadrant represents heroic narratives where both the protagonist and polity experience renewal, and the lower right quadrant tragic outcomes where both the protagonist and polity decline. The lower left quadrant is an ironic outcome, where the protagonist’s well-being improves despite the polity’s decline. The upper right is the sacrificial or retributive outcome, where the protagonist’s well-being declines even though the polity improves.

In my view, this framework represents how people think about narratives, or at least how they think about management narratives. Unconsciously, perhaps, they identify a movie as fitting within one of the four quadrants and then judge it in terms of their expectations for that quadrant. And it is this judgment that determines its popularity.

Charles Ferguson’s documentary Inside Job is the quintessential lower left quadrant ironic movie. The global economic recession, with its widespread social traumas like unemployment and housing foreclosure represents the polity’s decline. But the bankers, hedge fund capitalists, and misguided policy makers who put in place the practices and made the policy decisions that caused the recession have personally benefited from these practices and decisions, often on a massive (millions if not billions) scale.

Ferguson’s making of the documentary was an attempt to explain why the recession came about and to hold the bankers, hedgies, and policy makers accountable. When that community caught wind of his project, many refused to talk. But he had the good fortune that some agreed to talk, and thereby exposed their personal greed and indifference to the public good. (In my post of last Nov. 14 I note that four academics economists – John Campbell, Martin Feldstein, Glenn Hubbard, and Frederic Mishkin –demonstrated themselves to be the financial community’s useful idiots, much to the amusement of Ferguson’s audience).

As Ferguson himself in an interview in the New York Times on Friday Feb. 24, Inside Job is a movie motivated by a sense of injustice, a desire to find the cause, hold the malefactors accountable, and find ways to prevent the problem from recurring. Its effective communication of this reformist message appealed to audiences, critics, and members of the Academy.

As I argued in my post of Jan. 23 about The King’s Speech, it is the classic upper-left quadrant heroic movie, incorporating both an act of personal renewal, George VI overcoming his stutter, and national renewal, the UK replacing an unfit king (Edward VIII) with one who would ultimately embody the national will to resist Nazism. Heroic, or feel-good movies, if done well, are very popular. Audiences identified with both aspects of renewal, one the common fear of speaking in public, and the other the conflict that remains the epitome of a just war. Maybe the model they were judging it against was Casablanca, the classic tale of personal renewal in the context of that war.

Why did The King’s Speech trump The Social Network, also an excellent movie? (See my review of the latter posted last Oct. 26). One might also say that The Social Network is also an upper-left quadrant movie, because protagonist Zuckerberg gets mega rich and the world, presumably, is a better place because half a billion people now use Facebook. But the narrative is much more ambiguous. The movie, unflatteringly and apparently inaccurately, portrays Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as an aspie-loser-geek, and becoming wealthier than God still doesn’t overcome his essential geekiness. And it still leaves us asking if Facebook has made the world a better place.

So we have a choice between a full-blooded heroic feel-good movie and a much more ambiguous and ironic tale that floats around the edges of the upper left quadrant. Sophisticated high-brow critics prefer the subtle tale but the majority goes for the inspirational story. And the Academy listened to the majority.