Energized and Emotional? How German and Italian Politicians Emotionally Narrate Energy Policy in the EU Elections 2024

Climate change, climate policy, and energy transitions present wicked policy problems with no simple solutions, since they tend to aggravate social inequalities and provoke strong emotional responses among the public (Im et al., 2024; Ojala et al., 2021). These emotional reactions are not merely individual psychological responses; they are also influenced by the way emotions are employed in policy discourse. In policy narratives as studied by the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF), policy actors use emotionally-charged stories to influence public opinion and policy processes (Shanahan et al., 2018). Policy narratives are according to the NPF used at all stages of the policy process and feature at least one character (such as heroes, victims, villains) and a public policy referent (Jones et al., 2023). Yet while emotionality is thus a part of narrative strategies, emotion’s role in policy research is only beginning to be explored (Durnová, 2022; Fullerton et al., 2023; Pierce, 2021; Pierce et al., 2024; Yordy et al., 2024). In this paper, we focus on the emotional dimensions of policy communication before and during the 2024 European Parliament elections, a critical moment for European climate and energy policy amidst the rise of far-right parties. Given the energy sector’s significant role in EU emissions and the necessity of ‘green energy’ in sustainable infrastructure, we investigate which energy and transition issues were particularly salient during the 2024 EU election and how these issues were emotionally debated by policy actors in Germany and Italy. As two of the EU’s largest emitters, these countries face similar challenges regarding their sustainable energy transitions, yet approaching them with different policies. Using a novel dataset of N=7,104 Instagram posts on policy communication before and during the 2024 EU election, this paper employs a mixed-methods approach, integrating dictionary-based quantitative with qualitative content analysis. Specific emotion dictionaries have recently been developed for the public policy context (Fullerton et al., 2023, 2024; Gabehart et al., 2023; Yordy et al., 2024). As to our knowledge, those have not yet been applied within the NPF. We aim to test how well this method works for tracing discrete emotions in policy narratives. By qualitatively revising the dictionary-based findings on emotional expressions, integrating them with NPF elements and inductive coding, we aim to provide an enhanced understanding of the emotional dimensions of energy transition debates and policy conflicts in Europe.