Analyzing policy conflicts’ emotional climates: a mixed methods approach

With the growing focus on conflict in policy studies, the analysis of emotions becomes increasingly important. Many current studies add on emotions to existing frameworks about mobilization, the formation of advocacy coalitions, or components of (de)escalation. While such analyses are undeniably important, they risk underestimating emotions as key drivers of policy conflicts. Instead, we propose studying policy conflicts through the lens of the ‘emotional climates’ they generate and sustain, placing emotions at the core of the analysis. Adopting this perspective positions emotions, as expressed in public debates and reinforced by the actors involved, as the central lens through which policy conflicts unfold and develop. Adopting this lens to study policy conflicts and emotions, however, raises various methodological challenges. Firstly, how do to study ‘emotional climates’, in a time where these climates are spread across many online and offline communicative platforms? While there is a rich tradition in studying media articles or parliamentary debates for emotions, ways to conduct similar analyses on social media are less developed and pose unique challenges, such as issues of access, data volume, and interpretability. Secondly, how can we balance the need for large-scale textual analysis to capture overarching ‘collective emotions’ with the necessity of grounding these emotions in the specific localized contexts where they are expressed and reinforced. Finally, adopting the lens of emotional climates requires a close examination of the discursive processes involved in creating and sustaining these climates over time, both at the local level and within the broader public debate. This raises the question of how to study these processes in a way that effectively traces the underlying dynamics and their evolution. To address these challenges, this paper explores a mixed methods approach with a combination of quantitative and interpretive methods. As a first step, we propose to make use of a slightly modified version of Emotional Belief Analysis as developed by Chris Weible, Allegra Fullerton and others at UC Denver, in which emotion words, actors’ policy beliefs/values, some conflict attributes and indicators for time are coded in policy and media materials and then factored into a quantitative analysis. We propose extending this approach to include social media platforms, recognizing their pivotal role in shaping and sustaining emotional climates. This step offers a broad initial understanding of emotional climates and their relationship with other characteristics of policy conflict over time. A second step we propose, is to do an interpretive analysis of the stories through which the different discrete emotions that were found in step one are presented, by whom these stories are told and how frequent these stories appear. As interpretations of relations, procedures, substance and events unfold over time, an analysis of the emotional stories provides in depth access into these developments and enables us to connect the general to the local. Finally, by studying emotions and the stories in which they are embedded longitudinally, we hope to uncover the discursive dynamics at work in the emotional climates of policy conflicts and how they are maintained or disrupted over time.