Emotional Policy Storms: Reassessing the US Response to 9/11 Through the Lens of the Multiple Streams Framework

This paper moves beyond the conventional view of emotions in policy settings as mere contextual constraints in cases of low-intensity affective processes by introducing the concept of emotional policy storm—a sudden surge in the intensity of collective emotions, either positive or negative, within a policy context, sustained over an extended period. The conceptualization offered here addresses cases where high-intensity collective emotions emerge following a spectacularly emotional event or issue; emotions are thereafter shared at the collective level through bottom-up, horizontal, and top-down processes; and are further sustained over time by emotionally-charged numbers, images, rhetoric, political context, and media dynamics. Emotional policy storms function as mechanisms that link agendas, spaces of policy problems and solutions, and coalitions, over an extended period, while also acting as disruptive forces that reconfigure the policymaking process, generating strong demands for urgent, radical, and large-scale policy interventions. This paper further explores the conceptual reach of emotional policy storms by examining their usefulness in addressing existing weaknesses and ambiguities in the Multiple Streams Framework (MSF), particularly regarding the autonomy of streams, the complexity of coupling and policy windows, the endogeneity of agenda-setting and alternative specification, and the role of ideas. It offers an illustrative application of this conceptual addition to the MSF by assessing its feasibility in the case of the U.S. policy response to 9/11. It concludes with a discussion of methodological issues, a series of hypotheses, and final remarks.