A central concern in policy studies is understanding how multiple, contending groups in
society interact, deliberate, and forge agreements over policy issues. Often, public discourse
turns from engagement into impasse, as in the fractured politics of climate policy in the USA.
Existing theories are unclear about how such an “adversarial turn” develops. We theorize
that an important aspect of the adversarial turn is the evolution of a group's narrative into
what can be understood as an ideology, the formation of which is observable through certain …