The Emotional Politics of Norm Promotion: Understanding the Emergence of anti-PFAS Norm in the United States

Per- and Polyfluoralkyl substances (PFAS), used in many products including Teflon and Gore-Tex, have for decades been understood to cause harm to people's lives and the environment by spreading harmful particles into water. Despite advancing scientific inquiry, states have long been unwilling to regulate them. Only recently has the anti-PFAS norm gained traction leading to several states such as Denmark, Germany and the US proposing and passing laws limiting their use. Why has the reaction been so slow? Why did it took so long for the anti-PFAS norm to emerge? Although it is often assumed that environmental norms advance when scientific evidence of harm is consolidating, when political and corporate resistance is low and when activism intensifies, we argue that this does not fully explain the advance of the anti-PFAS norm. We focus on the case study of the US and hypothesise that despite existing scientific evidence and low political resistance, the norm gained traction only once the issue became charged with emotions. We trace the origins of the anti-PFAS norm formation to the Flint water crisis in Michigan, which made the issue of water quality highly emotional for local residents. As a result, Michigan representatives pursued anti-PFAS legislation on the national level. To uncover the role of emotions in the subsequent norm promotion, we adopt a mixed-methods framework, focusing on automated text analysis to study whether emotion-driven topics became more frequent as the Flint disaster unfolded. A corpus of texts on PFAS in Michigan, which includes local, state, and national news, cable media transcripts, and state and federal Congressional transcripts, is analysed using LDA unsupervised quantitative text analysis, which allows us to examine speaker-topic networks with a high degree of granularity. Our findings support our hypothesis and illustrate what role emotions play in norm promotion.