In this article, I highlight how crisis and persistence are narratives employed to describe democracy in the Pacific Islands. I outline six explanatory variables and illustrate how they interact temporally and spatially. By exploring the tensions within and between narratives, I provide a deeper reading of how the meanings we attach to democracy are negotiated and co-produced by theorists and policymakers. I conclude by arguing that this type of narrative analysis enables us to better understand how the taken-for-granted assumptions that are embedded within policy narratives inform governing practices.