In recent years emotions have taken center stage in studying political relations and interactions. Important contributions to the literature can be found in political psychology, the sociology of emotions, and studies of social movements. In the analysis of policy processes that followed from The Argumentative Turn, emotions seem to be an understudied theme. Much of the focus has been at best on the connection between fact and value or between policy arguments and symbolic aspects of meaning production. In our paper we will argue that language use and meaning production help citizens to figure out which feelings are legitimate in a specific policy context. Policy frames convey feelings together with rational arguments; they are two aspects of the same process. The usage of rhetorical techniques such as problem definitions, causal attributions, and moral judgments, together with the usage of metaphors, provides access to the affective aspects of framing processes and leverage on the effect of affect in policy practices. For our empirical analysis we draw on research on the political mobilization of citizens against a process of municipal amalgamation in The Netherlands between 1997 and 2001. This process started as a policy controversy between policy-makers, but quickly developed into a case of contentious politics in which political opponents started to mobilize citizens against the plans. Our analysis of the framing processes shows that the emotional aspects of meaning production by the opponents shifted from fear to anger. This shift was of great significance, because a statistical analysis amongst active citizens indicates that feelings of anger motivated them to protest the policy plans in high numbers. There definitely was an effect of affect behind the protest behavior that was closely related to intense framing efforts by political opponents.
