Emotions and the Politics of Social Policy Reform

It seems that for most people – except for scholars of the welfare state – social policy and its reform is obviously an emotional topic. Take recent events in Chile, where an ostensibly modest increase in metro ticket prices caused widespread anger and severe protests, with people also calling for broad social policy reforms. Fear and anxiety, compassion, envy, shame and anger, but also pride are among the emotions that have been (rather unsystematically) linked to various social policy themes. Based on a cursory review of the extremely fragmented literature about the emotional underpinnings of social policy – which comes mostly from psychology, sociology, and philosophy – we illustrate how emotions can be used to better understand a key issue of welfare state research: the politics of reforms. We show that emotions are present, but typically only implicit in explanatory accounts like Pierson’s New Politics of the Welfare State. By making specific emotions like anger and shame explicit as central ingredients of the causal mechanisms of reform politics, we illustrate that some empirical puzzles of the politics of welfare state reform can be better explained. We use appraisal theory of emotion, a body of well-established psychological theories about differential emotional reactions to events and perceptions, as building blocks for mechanisms of affective politics of reform. Building on recent examples of social policy reforms, we show, for example, that linking only positive emotions to welfare state expansion and negative ones to retrenchment is implausible and that strategies of retrenchment are typically about manipulating the exact kind of positive and negative emotional reactions of voters in complex ways. However, it is not only voters but also policymakers who exhibit emotional behavioural patterns, as the example of recent French debates shows.