What Drives Heated ‘Green’ Policy Conflicts? Comparing Emotionalisation of Issues Vs. Processes in Italy’s Superbonus and the German Heating Law

Policy conflicts are often not only about the policy content, but also about the policy processes themselves, especially in climate and energy policy where multiple policy fields and decision-making levels intersect. In such contexts, policy conflicts can shift from being issue-based to becoming ‘relational’, focusing on actors’ relations and their legitimacy rather than the content of policy measures (Wolf, 2021). Emotional appeals and the emotionalisation of policy communication are central in this conflict escalation, yet emotions’ role in shaping ‘green’ policy conflicts remains underexplored. This paper analyses emotionalized policy communication around two cases concerning the energetic renovation of houses – Italy’s Superbonus 110 and Germany’s Gebäudeenergiegesetz. The implementation and reform of these policies was emotionally discussed, due to their ambivalent redistributive effects and putting into question the legitimacy of climate-policymaking. Against this background, the paper asks how policy actors emotionalize the process versus the content in these debates, comparing different stages in the policy process. A Narrative Policy Framework analysis (NPF) is employed, drawing on recent approaches to tracing discrete emotions in policy communication (Fullerton et al., 2025; Pierce et al., 2024; Yordy et al., 2024), in order to systematically analyse how emotions are embedded in policy narratives at different stages of the policy process. Conceptually, this study contributes to advancing the integration of emotions into NPF scholarship through distinguishing process- from content-oriented emotionalisation. Empirically, it offers insights into the emotional dynamics of ‘green’ policy conflicts in Europe, illustrating how emotional policy narratives shape contentious policy debates in Italy and Germany.