Linking Insecurity, Emotions and Protective Policies: Evidence from Survey Data and Elite Interviews

In times of polycrises, the need to address feelings of insecurity has become a core feature of policy-making. Hence, emotions, which have, admittedly, never been absent in politics, move even more center stage. In the last decade or so, scholars from political psychology have contributed tremendously to our understanding of how emotions influence political attitudes and behaviour – both on the individual (Capelos & Demertzis, 2018; Marcus, 2002) and the collective level (Scheve & Salmela, 2014). Similarly, emotions have been studied increasingly in political communication (Kim et al., 2024; Szabó & Lipiński, 2024) and in narratives (Bonansinga, 2022) showing that political rhetoric is invaded by emotional statements. Compared to these more established fields, policy scholars have only started to analyse the relationships between insecurities and emotions on the one and policy-making on the other hand. Against this background, this paper aims at bringing together these bodies of research and studies the questions to what extent perceptions of insecurity and respective protective policy proposals are interlinked with emotions. We do so quantitatively on the micro-level by drawing on original survey data and complement these insights with evidence from elite interviews with policy-makers on a protective policy case study.