Analyzing Policy Conflicts’ Emotional Climates

Panel: Evidence & emotions/ Evidence & conflict With the growing focus on conflict in policy studies, the analysis of emotions becomes increasingly important. Many current studies add on emotions to existing frameworks about mobilization, the formation of advocacy coalitions, or components of (de)escalation and/or separate emotions as something distinct from reason- or facts based discussion. While such analyses are undeniably important, they risk underestimating emotions as key drivers of policy conflicts. Instead, we propose studying policy conflicts through the lens of the ‘emotional climates’ they generate and sustain, placing emotions at the core of the analysis. Adopting this perspective positions emotions, as expressed in public debates and reinforced by the actors involved, as the central lens through which policy conflicts unfold and develop. This perspective also implies that emotions are not opposed to reason or facts, as many policy studies implicitly assume, but are deeply intertwined with how policy-relevant knowledge is produced and understood. Actors embedded in policy conflicts, in other words, ‘feel’ their way through the so-called facts of the case. Adopting this lens to study policy conflicts, however, raises various methodological challenges. Firstly, how do to study ‘emotional climates’, in a time where these climates are spread across many online and offline communicative platforms? While there is a rich tradition in studying media articles or parliamentary debates for emotions, ways to conduct similar analyses on social media are less developed and pose unique challenges, such as issues of access, data volume, and interpretability. Secondly, ff actors ‘feel’ their way through their understanding of the facts in policy conflicts, analysis must remain attentive to what these cases are and how they become imbued with meaning. How can we balance the need for large-scale textual analysis to capture overarching ‘collective emotions’ with the necessity of grounding these emotions in the specific localized contexts where they are expressed and reinforced. Finally, adopting the lens of emotional climates raises the question of how to study these processes in a way that effectively traces the underlying dynamics and their evolution over time. To address these challenges, this paper develops a mixed-methods approach that combines quantitative and interpretive methods to analyze emotional climates in policy conflicts across communicative arenas and over time.