This research introduces a new model for understanding how narratives around poverty and federalism interact. This PovFed model uses a principal-agent structure to identify the federalism orientation of individual states and a deservingness model to identify orientation toward poverty. Putting these two together provides a tool for understanding how these two narrative frameworks interact. The PovFed model enables social workers in policy and public administration conserve advocacy resources in the short term by framing policy options in line with prevailing narratives, and provides a structure for building toward long-term narrative change.The way we talk about policy issues conveys important evidence of the stories we form around social problems. These shared stories are more deeply held than political or ideological orientations. Narrative policy analysis provides a framework for identifying linkages between these explanatory stories and policy initiatives; creating a powerful tool for social workers and public administrators to increase the productivity of their efforts toward social justice goals. This paper tests the utility of this approach focusing on state poverty reduction initiatives and the intersectionality of causal stories related to poverty and the state-federal partnership.The debate over whether and how to intervene to reduce poverty and/or alleviate can be described not as one coherent narrative but as several narrative frames that each remain relevant today. Similarly, narrative frames regarding the parameters that bound state-level and federal-level intervention in poverty, the boundaries of federalism, remain both contested and enduring. Analyzing state poverty initiatives in the wake of the economic crisis of 2008-2009 reveals that states who took up these initiatives generally aligned with theories related to devolution rather than hollow state theories, as these states assign significant levels of agency to their level of government. These states also were aligned more strongly with causal stories or narrative themes related to poverty that locate cause in societal and economic spheres rather than on individual behaviors. A typology of states is proposed that may future efforts to reduce poverty within states by focusing on causal stories. While further research is required to validate this typology with larger sets of states and comparative data using a poverty measure that accounts for state actions, this theoretical typology of states may inform future state-federal partnerships that leverage the complexity of poverty-related narratives to reduce poverty.
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