The authors first introduce the rhetorical tool of the topos and explain how it relates to political narrative. To illustrate the role of topoi in communicative action, they draw on data from a research project on citizens’ conceptions of fairness, reciprocity and solidarity in the European Union, HEUREC (link ). From the transcripts of these focus groups, they select and analyze a range of topoi that participants resorted to. Some topoi can be characterized as ‘universal’ because they occurred frequently across countries and sociodemographic groups. Others seem to be more specific to certain countries or scenarios. The authors suggest that as ‘narratives in a nutshell’, topoi can offer speakers an alternative to storylines with chronological ordering but also a nucleus from which more complex narrative structures can emerge.