Mapping the Emotional Landscape of Consultation Contributions

Consultations are often conceptualized as rational information exchange. Policymakers give access to the policymaking process in exchange for technical or political information. Our paper proposes a complementary way of analyzing consultations: They are also venues for expressing emotions about public policies. We test two simple hypotheses: First, citizens statements to consultations are more emotional. Second, contributions mentioning concrete policy measures contain more emotions than contributions referring to the abstract policy framework. We test our hypotheses using a dictionary-based sentiment coding of ~7300 contributions to the consultation of German electricity grid construction plan. Our analysis corroborates both hypotheses: Citizens responses are more emotional, especially voicing fear. Moreover, if contributions refer to a specific power line, they contain less joy, but more fear and sadness. Thus, our paper shows a way to conceptualize and measure the link between public policies and the emotions that they trigger.