Navigating Emotional Currents: Unveiling the Role of Emotions in Discourse Coalitions and Deliberative Practices

The policy process should consider what we think and how we feel. The discourse coalition approach sheds light on how diverse groups of individuals conceptualise the same social phenomenon in the political process. Discourse coalitions are formed around a social construct which gives meaning to a specific contentious social issue. Since the production and reception of social constructs carry emotional undercurrents, emotions can be critical in mobilising discourse coalitions and subsequent deliberative processes. Emotions such as anger, fear, and empathy can affect deliberative and communicative exchanges of members within and between discourse coalitions. This paper discusses the Theory of Constructed Emotion and how emotions have been investigated in the research on discourse coalitions and deliberative policy analysis. The paper highlights the attributes of anger, fear, and empathy, explores how these emotions underpin discourse coalitions, and unveils how emotions are pivotal in the shared understanding of social constructs that bind coalition members together. Furthermore, it delves into how these shared emotional contexts influence deliberative practices and shape policy debates and outcomes. This paper aims to enrich the discourse of coalition politics by foregrounding the integral role of emotions, thereby offering nuanced strategies for more emotionally informed and effective policy deliberations.