Governing Emotion: How to Analyze
Emotional Political
Situations
This chapter introduces the theory behind this book. It addresses the way governments cope with highly emotional issues and events. Emotions and political emotionality provide a frame for understanding the central question of public policy: “Who gets what, when, and how” (Lasswell 1950)? This emotional lens is important because it highlights how feelings can facilitate the distribution of political penalties. These may be internal pressures for individual actors because a sensitive issue can also be also temporally acute, representing a problem that matters, to the people that matter, during a time that matters. Alternatively, there may be a collective and cascading distribution of negative consequences based on how many people care about an issue, how much they care, and for how long. The nature of emotional prejudices ferments exogenous or endogenous penalties that help issues gain attention and rise on the agenda.
For instance, the emotional nature of issues and events is often predictable and results in increases in salience (Downs 1972; Birkland 1998; Baumgartner and Jones 2009) that influences media attention and mobilizes the public in ways that distribute penalties toward political actors. The mobilization of political pressures can include attention by the media that leads to government action (Wolfe 2012) and collective public behavior, including calls to government representatives (Langbein and Lotwis 1990), emails to legislators (Bergan 2009), social media engagement (Obar et al. 2012), online petitions (Vromen 2008), interest group lobbying (Walker 1991; Baumgartner and Jones 2009; Baumgartner and Leech
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C. L. Pepin-Neff, Flaws, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10976-9_3
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2001), social protest (Gould 2009; Jasper 1998), and shifts in voting behavior (Achen and Bartels 2012). These penalties are often managed by those most vulnerable to them, and these actors attempt to influence what tools and policies governments use to defend themselves. As a result, I argue that highly emotional policy domains are designed in ways to alleviate those penalties, including distributing public emotion.
This chapter is an argument for how we contextualize emotions in policy analysis. Public policy research requires an investment in theoretical as well as practical examinations of the role of emotions in policymaking for several reasons. First, while policy studies has welcomed the introduction of statistical analysis and neurological evidence of behavior, it has been less inclined to consider the theoretical connections offered by political sociology, feminism, and other social science fields. Second, there are big questions that public policy still cannot answer alone and a more comprehensive emotional lens helps with this analysis. For example, policy responses to highly emotional issues, even the same issue, often produce different results. This may require considering the scientific role of a certain stimulus being received by a group as well as the systems of government in question and the distributive effects of policy responses on the public. Science alone and public policy alone are not equipped to address these questions. Thirdly, public policy research contends with a constellation of emotions and the social and political machinery that filters them. What is needed at this stage is a way to begin examining the interaction effects of certain emotional political situations with institutional arrangements. Finally, these considerations of emotions and policy arrangements are critical to policy studies because there is significant potential for policies that manipulate the public. Eleanor Ostrom notably raised the alarm in stating that the behavioral aspects of political science are “vulnerable to manipulation” (Ostrom 1998, 16). She added, “[C]itizens need additional skills and knowledge to resolve the social dilemmas they face is left unaddressed. Their moral decisions are not discussed” (Ostrom 1998, 18). This chapter builds on this suggestion by considering different categories of emotional political situations, issues, and contexts, which facilitate different political penalties.
To begin, emotions reflect both evolutionary and socially adapted hierarchies that prejudice certain issues, at certain times, in the policy process. Emotion is identified as what is more tangibly felt. This chapter moves forward in four sections: First, I review the consideration of emotions in leading theories of the policy process. Secondly, I highlight ways in which
emotions and political emotionality can be considered more broadly in the distributive nature of public policy. Thirdly, I propose an emotion-policy framework that looks at how actors and institutions attempts to defend against these distributions of penalties. Lastly, I conclude by noting the implications of a focus on political emotionality and penalty distribution in policy analysis.
Policy ScienceS and the emotional turn
Political science has been a core contributor in the social science’s turn toward emotions and affect, including theories of the policy process, crisis management, and behavioral public policy. For instance, multiple streams theory (MST) (Kingdon 1984) notes the importance of public mood and the way emotive features may be used to manipulate actors (Zahariadis 2007). Emotions impact the way an issue obtains attention, the way policy entrepreneurs use emotion to get their issue on the agenda, and the selection of policy outputs. Zahariadis (2007) notes that “policy makers and entrepreneurs use labels and symbols that have specific cognitive referents and emotional impact” (Zahariadis 2007, 70). Emotion can assist in fixating attention to an issue. Moreover, emotional issues and emotion priming can influence the context of government behavior (Zahariadis 2007, 77). Ultimately, MST underlies the way emotions play a key role in “political manipulation” (Zahariadis 2007, 84).
The Advocacy Coalition Framework (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1993) recognizes the role of prospect theory (Kahneman and Tversky 1979) and “Devil Shift” (Sabatier et al. 1987). In the first, while losses are perceived to be more important than gains, Sunstein (2005, 66) notes that “prospect theory does not set out a special role for emotions.” However, in Devil Shift, extremely negative feelings about an opponent infiltrate an organization’s way of thinking and operating. Sabatier et al. (1987) note that understanding these motivations is important because of the potential for abuse in the political system, stating, “[D]evil shift has all the worst features of a positive feedback loop: the more one views opponents as malevolent and very powerful, the more likely one is to resort to questionable measures to preserve one’s interest.” In addition, punctuated equilibrium theory (Baumgartner and Jones 2009) makes a key underlying contribution as a theory of information processing and attributes bounded rationality (Simon 1996) of individuals to governments. Attentiveness is impacted by emotionality and influences the policy image. True, Jones,
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and Baumgartner (1999, 161) note that “[p]olicy images are a mixture of empirical information and emotive appeals.” Punctuated equilibrium’s consideration of how deep core beliefs motivate actors is also important to the concept of the “delta parameter” (Ostrom 1998), which is consistent with how much someone cares about an issue.
New concepts and theories about emotions are also contributing to policy studies piece by piece outside of well-established frameworks, as Marcus (2000, 222) notes, “a consensus on the effects of emotion in politics remains to be achieved.” Lodge and Hood (2002, 4) look at policy responses to highly emotional dog bites and note that institutions in “forced-choice” situations “adopt strategies for survival in the face of environmental shocks.” In addition, Lodge and Taber (2005, 455) have contributed significantly to understanding the role of emotions in public policy with their review of the concept of “hot cognition” and their experiments, which found that feelings toward political leaders, groups, and issues can be triggered “automatically” if there is “congruence” between the concepts (e.g. cockroach as “disgusting”). Indeed, this research was joined by the landmark work in neuroscience by De Martino et al. (2006, 684), who looked at brain function in regard to choices. They found “a key role for an emotional system in mediating decision biases.”
In addition, Druckman and McDermott (2008, 318) reviewed the effects of emotion on the framing and selection of risks. They note that “emotions serve motivating functions” that impact how individuals make choices. In particular, Weber (2013, 414) examined the role of emotion in political ad campaigns (Weber 2013) and found that “anger emerges as a mobilizing force.” In short, political organizations use emotions to recruit, sustain, and mobilize actors (Jasper 1998); candidates use emotional appeals to influence voters (Brader 2005); and elected officials use emotions to achieve policy outcomes (Lupia and Menning 2009). It is therefore no stretch of theory or practice to suggest that policy responses are designed and used by governments to distribute public emotions in ways that facilitate or interrupt penalties such as rebellious public behavior.
Recent studies in behavioral economics and public policy have taken this research one step further and applied it to policy implementation. They rely on scientific advances and theory-building by looking at the distributive effect of policy responses on the public. Nudge (Thaler and Sunstein 2008) literature considers “how cognitive pathways, social norms and moral convictions influence thinking and behavior” (Moseley and Stoker 2013, 5). Predicting how the public will respond to a given message
or stimulus requires understanding how people’s emotions influence their thinking and weighting about different issues, events, or tasks. This distributive look at public policy has been highlighted by the risk literature following crises (McConnell 2003), focusing events (Birkland 1998), and moral panics (Goode and Ben-Yehuda 1994); however, this chapter is considering emotions and politically emotionality more acutely. For instance, while risk theory looks at the way emotions make an event seem more probable, I am examining how the emotionality of an event distributes penalties to political actors. Douglas (1985, 67) notes that “expert risk analysis takes as its decision-making unit the individual agent, excluding from the choice any moral or political feedback that he may be receiving from his surrounding society.” With these components, concepts, and frameworks in mind, this chapter focuses on emotion’s effects in the policy process. As Weible (2014, 5) notes, “[O]ne implication of the continuous and interactive nature of policy process research is a need for multiple theories to highlight, describe, and explain different and sometimes overlapping or nested partitions of the policy process to account for a variety of interactions often expressed as inputs and outputs.”
Broader concePtionS of emotionS in PuBlic Policy
Attention in agenda setting is mitigated by relative emotional salience and political power. Underlying this argument are well-established assumptions about the hierarchy of emotions and the hierarchy of identities that function in the political system. To connect these more fully in the policy process I argue that public policy should incorporate a multidisciplinary understanding of emotions in three ways.
First, I argue that “political emotionality” is a social condition that distributes predictable political penalties relative to other competing stimuli, social contexts, and the power dynamics for a given issue. Emotionality is a political concept because emotions do not stand in isolation, but are the political manifestation of biases that prejudice and allow the distribution of emotional expressions, to certain groups, on certain issues, at certain times. This is based on the combination of the hardwired affective, physiological, and necessarily salient response to an issue or event (Damasio 1994); the socially constructed and cultural sensitivities or amplifications of that emotion relative to hierarchies of identity (Crenshaw 1991; Schneider and Ingram 1993), discourse, images, and causal stories (Stone 1989) (particularly intentionality); and the emotional rules and norms
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that govern emotional expression (Hochschild 1983). Public policy and implementation therefore plays a key role in challenging or reproducing norms that set forth how groups are viewed and which emotional rules apply.
Degrees of political emotionality and disruptions that overflow established boundaries or expectations place pressures on political actors and institutions based on the level of vulnerability, which helps determine whether a social problem is a political problem. One measure of this is how many people care about an issue, how much they care, and for how long. This builds on Crawford and Ostrom (1995), who “refer to this internal valuation as a delta parameter that is added to or subtracted from the objective costs of an action.” The delta parameter is an “internal valuation – positive or negative – to taking particular types of action” (Ostrom 1998, 9). The authors note that “the delta parameters originating from internal sources can be thought of as the guilt or shame felt when breaking a prescription and the pride or ‘warm glow’ felt when following a prescription” (Crawford and Ostrom 1995, 587). Another measure is the target of the emotionality. Groups with more political power may cue a bias that presents a more sympathetic case and supports widespread caring.
The emotional rules of engagement on political issues and how social movements mobilize build off of political sociology and Bourdieu’s (1977) concept of “habitus,” which are the emotional norms and rules that govern a situation. The theoretical work on emotional habitus is useful because political emotionality is an interaction effect. It is not simply that we are dealing with “western” emotions, but rather that we are dealing with an entire western apparatus that privileges white, wealthy, patriarchal, English-speaking, cis-gendered, able-bodied, heterosexual, and masculine emotions, and allocates power to the distribution and reproduction of those emotions, by those people and the media that desire their funds. So an issue may gain attention but exist within rules that place the issue within a limited emotional hierarchy and which can be dissipated. Individual cultural arrangements may and do vary, but the dominant socially constructed contribution to political emotionality paradigms is set forth above. This is affirmed by Marks (1999, 619), who examined the way the feelings of those with disabilities can be invalidated by social rules and manifest “emotional oppression” by facilitating internalized selfdisregard that reproduces social oppression. However, it is important to note that this is not a linear process. The imposition of policies against a group can also destabilize the emotional habitus of that target population
(Gould 2009) and create new feelings about the state that alter the emotional norms and rules that restrict action, the acceptability of action, or the support for action.
Second, emotions are a resource that is managed by the government. This is consistent with research in sociology, feminist studies, and psychology that consider the real costs of emotional labor (Hochschild 1983; Brotheridge and Grandey 2002), which Hochschild (1983, 7) defines as labor that “requires one to induce or suppress feelings in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others.” Or put another way, it is the emotional effort and labor that is exerted by someone to present one type of emotional state in order to receive positive feedback from the client. In the same way that costs can be incurred in the commercial regulation of an emotional state, “emotional taxation” can exist when the policies of the state place an emotional price for a particular group engaging on a particular side of a given issue as a citizen.
Finally, emotionality as a political condition distributes penalties and tests the strength of political actors’ institutions. Levels of insulation or vulnerability may depend on the intensity, duration, and relative salience of the issue. This can also be affected by the widespread distribution and the ease of communication to enable shared emotions to motivate collective action across communication devices or in heavily populated areas. Social media is in many ways emotional media and it is important to recognize this core function, which can increase pressures and require governments to develop policies and policy threshold arrangements to reinforce and protect themselves from these exogenous forces. The goal of institutions is to design tools that interrupt this combination of factors, which may be done by opening the political process and introducing a policy that is directed at the emotion itself, the target group itself, the time period, or the relative salience. In short, the policy responses and arrangements offer actors and governments a number of instruments and tools to try and mitigate the emotionality of an issue.
attention and Salience
Salience is the degree of importance and corresponding attention an issue is given relative to other competing issues. For instance, slow news cycles (such as summertime or holidays) are referred to as salience-prone periods of time. Conversely, stimuli that have survival value, such as threats,
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changes in norms, and uncertainty, acquire advantaged importance and greater focus, which often translates into intense news cycles. However, the circumstances that represent increased salience may also include a reduced capacity to absorb those characteristics, favoring less complex narratives and responses. In other words, salience comes at a price. The more intense the attention on an issue, the harder it can be to absorb all of the various elements. To cope, policies that reinforce “known knowns,” heuristics, and “rules of thumb” (Sunstein 2006) are more likely to be introduced if acute high-salience situations become overwhelming. This is consistent with the premises of “bounded rationality” (Simon 1996) and “limited capacity” theory (Lang 2000). As a result, I argue that clustered stimuli can produce faster responses followed by lower policy thresholds. This process relies on the adoption of heuristic elements, which feed illusory corollaries and historical analogies, based on an event’s representativeness and availability. These methods reinforce the clustering of “like” events based on their frequency, correlation, or both, and stimulate an aversion to the costs imposed by dreaded aggregate outcomes. In other words, a series of very bad things have occurred in quick succession, so to cope, they are linked together as one big event to understand it better, and during these periods of stress, political actors provide familiar themes to act as shortcuts to convey points to the public. In response, policy reactions act to interrupt the outcome aggregation clustering and associated emotional cascades, which can produce overreactions in the short term and policy legacies over the long term.
Indeed, highly emotional issues can create unique social and political problems because these socially aversive conditions take up personal resources, leaving a limited capacity for people to consider the issue. This is important because the sequential frequency or severity of events can overwhelm the public when stimuli or events are clustered. This is consistent with the economic literature which suggests that in the face of sustained or repeated highly negative events, there can be an aggregation of these outcomes into a psychological condition called “temporal combining” (referred to here as outcome aggregation) (Linville and Fischer 1991, 8). An example of this is referring to the nearly 3000 people murdered in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C. as “9/11” and referring to the 13 students and a teacher killed at Columbine High School, simply as “Columbine.” Here, the multiple individual events are aggregated or combined together into one larger event and then referred to with a mental shortcut to allow people to comprehend such a tragedy.
The policy implications of temporal combining or aggregate outcomes rely on the way responses link events together or separate them. In both, the role of emotions is key. Linville and Fischer (1991) highlight the way temporal combining aggregates multiple emotional events together into one larger, more intense outcome. For another example, a fatal shark bite could be a high-emotion event, but the occurrence of three shark bites in a short period near a populated area may aggregate the events together, creating a high-emotion aggregation. As a result, the distressing situation moves the issue more easily across the social threshold for tolerance and impinges on process capacity, overwhelming the public and facilitating political pressure such as interest-group unrest. This aspect of highly emotional events is important because some widespread distressing situations can only be resolved through legislative action, and this imposes penalties on government actors to act quickly.
Underlying this analysis there are a number of assumptions. First, policy responses should occur faster for multiple negative events which: (a) occur more closely together and (b) are seen as correlated. This is based on the assumption that both people and governments desire loss buffering following episodes where multiple negative events have been combined, or “extreme loss clustering.” The aggregation of negative events represents one of the most averse situations because it demands greater energy and a reduced capacity of resources. This results in attempts to rapidly relieve this aversive condition. Immediate responses attempt to return situations to the norm, in which individuals and communities consider their emotions based on separate outcomes.
Secondly, the direction of policy responses is focused on positively emotional tools that disaggregate outcomes. Linville and Fischer’s (1991) “renewable resources” model argues that the introduction of a new “positive” event outcome interrupts the aggregation of negative outcomes. This advantages the selection of publicly acknowledged “positive” reactions to achieve the desired goal. The diagnosis of an event as representative of a familiar situation and the selection of a correspondingly acknowledged positive solution quickly shift the affective or emotional states. The response meets the demand of providing emotional relief, even though it may not reduce risk. As a result, policy responses favor historical path dependencies to relieve social anxiety and in order to disrupt the aggregation more rapidly.
Examples of recognized positive outcomes include events intended to symbolize justice, retribution, and understanding. These responses are
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illustrated when a scandal-ridden politician resigns from office, when an investigation is announced following a disaster, or when a politician delivers a cathartic speech following a crisis. An implication of this feature suggests that policy responses need not burden the target if there are other positively perceived options. In this book’s case, killing sharks may not be the only way to alleviate public anxiety following a shark bite incident. However, preferences for the fastest and most reliable positive relief policy response may encourage visible punitive instruments.
Thirdly, previously clustered events will have low policy thresholds in the future because of their connection to dreaded aggregate outcomes. The fear that a subsequent individual event may represent both (a) an emotionally intense individual incident and (b) the cue for the beginning of a new dreaded cluster means that, at the first sign of the hazard, responses should take place. When hazard stimuli are present, they can invoke framings around a historical analogy if the characteristics are seen as representative of that event. As a result, political thresholds are used as a policy tool to prevent future dread aggregation. This dread prevention is consistent with the evolutionary aspects of McDermott et al.’s ( 2008 ) theory of prospect theory analysis because under their argument, “even a single negative experience resulting from encounters with predators or poisoned food may prove essential for survival” (McDermott et al. 2008 , 337).
These elements can be seen in a review of shark bite policy responses in Table 3.1. Eleven locations are reviewed between 1952 and 2011. I examine the number of shark bites that took place before a policy response, the number of days between incidents, and the time between the last incident and the response. Here we see that it is common for two or three bites to be the trigger for government salience and response. In addition, we see
Table 3.1 Evaluating the speed of policy responses from the last shark bite incident
t
6SeychellesSeychelles20112(2)16-08-111/8/20111520-08-114Sharkhunt 4ReunionIslandFrance20113(2)19-09-1116-06-119527-09-118Sharkhunt
8HongKongUnitedKingdom/China19932(2)12/6/19931/6/19931129-06-9317Exclusionnettrial
5RecifeBrazil199411(2)13-12-9411/12/199426/1/199519Banonsurfingtookeffect
11QueenslandAustralia19624(2)28-12-6128-12-6101962300Sharknet
9DurbanSouthAfrica19524(1)29-11-5128-11-5111952300Sharknet
3DunedinNewZealand19682(1)25-12-6815-09-681011/12/1969300Sharknet
that shark hunts are the fastest response option, followed by an exclusion net trial in Hong Kong and a ban on surfing in Recife. It is also often the case that orders for shark hunts can be given by local or state officials allowing policy entrepreneurs to open and close the policy window at the same time, since catching and killing a shark often closes the window.
Policy entrePreneurShiP
The impact of individual actors on the policy process, known as policy entrepreneurs, has been a long-standing issue in political science and provides an important contribution to this analysis. The definition of policy entrepreneurs is summarized by Botterill (2013, 99) as elected or unelected actors who “work to influence debate by framing issues and developing solutions to policy problems which they are ready to promote as soon as an opportunity to do so presents itself.” Policy entrepreneurship involves those “game changers” and political actors who use their time, resources, and ideas to impact public perceptions and public policy (Mintrom and Norman 2009). This includes elected officials, the media, and individual activists. I argue that entrepreneurship requires obtaining the status needed to influence or bypass governance structures and compete equally against other entrepreneurs. An “outsider” activist who handcuffs oneself to a White House fence for a cause would not be a policy entrepreneur unless they, their ideas, or coalition is also able to transcend structural limitations to influence the “insider” debate. Simply put, they must have the status to be a political player. In addition, policy entrepreneurs use causal stories to attach their solution to a problem. Stone (2006, 129) argues that “policy makers also need a persuasive causal story, because problems come onto the political agenda on the backs of causal stories.” Causal stories address the narratives that are contested to defend or overturn the status quo. Problem definition development illustrates the way powerful stakeholders and opponents use rhetoric and symbols (Stone 1989) to argue which issues are the problems, what is the cause, who is to blame, how big is the scope, and what is the solution.
The emergence of an issue may shock one public but not another. However, if high degrees of emotion and salience align, then these pressures can reach a political “boiling point” that opens policy windows in which policy entrepreneurs use competing problem definitions and causal stories to advocate for their solutions. In return, the policy outcomes offered by entrepreneurs respond to the perceptions of public fear,
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outrage, or disgust toward certain outcomes and their particular fears of dreaded consequences.
Being positioned in the right job and within the right political system is essential to using skills or brokering outcomes. The jobs and status of policy entrepreneurs matter because of the different levels of jurisdiction, access, and mediation that they allow. “Insider” and “outsider” labels have been used as well as the study of elected legislators as “proximate” (Mintrom and Norman 2009) policy entrepreneurs. The job may also influence the balance of outcome brokerage. If a politician is the leading entrepreneur, then they may have readier access to decision-makers and re-election interests are likely a leading outcome goal. As a result, the level of access and preference for outcomes that are aligned with the government lead to certain types of outcome management, including responding to the outrage associated with hazards but not the hazards themselves (Brändström and Kuipers 2003). A political response with “bluster” or empathy may be more important because reducing the perception of government inaction or the perception of risk is seen as more important than actual action or risk reduction.
Policy aS theraPy
Policy responses can provide “emotional relief” to these aversive highly emotional conditions by introducing a positively perceived response to disaggregate the events and interrupt the negative emotions or by attempting to pre-emptively stop negative high-emotion aggregations in the first place. Linville and Fischer (1991) refer to this within psychology as the “renewable resources model,” in which positive feedback is introduced to provide support to individuals or groups who are experiencing temporally combined negative feedback. They argue that the introduction of positive emotional stimuli (a speech, law, or action) can break up negative highemotion aggregations. In this way, policies provide a therapeutic role in facilitating a form of positive relief from the negative condition. Policy threshold arrangements align with this strategy by attempting to preemptively limit or regulate the clustering of dreaded outcomes that lead to negative high-emotion aggregations in the first place. This is consistent with Brändström, Bynander, and t’Hart (2004, 192), who examine crises and note that “their very unacceptability motivates actors to prevent their recurrence.” Aggregation prevention measures therefore attempts to distribute the frequency of temporally combinable aversive states. Examples
include policies directed at stopping multiple “shoe-bomb” terrorist attacks and small rocket fire from Palestine. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu noted the need for aggregation prevention as a prolonged period of time of safety for the Israeli people as the basis for his operation in the West Bank. He stated, “This operation will only end when quiet and security is established for the citizens of Israel for a prolonged period” (SBS 2014). Here we see how the political penalties from these aversive problem conditions encourage actors to select or tee up quickly adoptable measures that provide positive emotional relief and potentially reduce the frequency or clustering of negative events.
ProPoSing an emotion-Policy framework
This chapter continues by providing a conceptual framework to consider the role of emotionality in policymaking. As Ostrom (1998, 15) notes, “We need to expand the type of research methods regularly used in political science.” This begins with a consideration of policy thresholds. Policy thresholds are defined as the formal or informal arrangements that facilitate the opening of a policy window. Policy windows are simply those periods of time in which a political process is open to change. This can be facilitated through different legal standards, discursive cues, social boundaries, political rituals, and cultural norms (especially emotional rules and norms) that govern decision-making equilibrium around individual policy issues and domains. Different sets of rules apply to different groups and issues. Douglas (1985, 4) notes how “perception of risks is encoded in institutions.” This is consistent with Weible (2014), who notes that public policy should be sure to analyze “the actual rules-in-use that structure the day-to-day behaviors of actors engaged in situations in a policy process.” And finally, political penalties are defined as “internal or external pressures that damage the ability of a political actor to keep their position or impair their future ambitions” (Neff 2016).
Policy threshold levels are based on the degree of political damage an individual actor or collective institution is willing to assume for the benefit of inaction. High thresholds are designed to place burdens, including emotional taxation, on certain groups to keep actors out of the process. Low thresholds allow policy windows to open to provide actors the opportunity to calm public distress or anxiety, which I refer to as emotional relief. The emotion-policy framework assumes that political actors and governments treat emotions and attention as a public resource to be managed
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and distributed. Under this analysis, issues and events are analyzed across two main variables: the way emotions facilitate the distribution of penalizing conditions and the way governmental actors use tools within a policy domain to construct thresholds that manage the opening and closing of policy windows.
Under the emotion-policy framework, political issues are categorized using a four-square model that plots two variables: degrees of emotion, noted as high emotion and low emotion, and policy thresholds, noted as high thresholds and low thresholds (Fig. 3.1). The four categories are high emotion-low policy threshold (HELP), high emotion-high policy threshold (HEHP), low emotion-low policy threshold (LELP), and low emotion-high policy threshold (LEHP). The strength of policy thresholds differs based on the emotional priority of certain types of issues and the arrangements of the policy domain. Policy thresholds are designed to limit or welcome the number of people who can systematically care about an issue at a given time. Managing time efficiently is seen as a key rationale in
Fig. 3.1 Proposed model of emotion-to-policy threshold levels
controlling policy domains, which can function as a primary objective (Drucker 1985). In this way governments use thresholds to distribute the emotionality and attention given to an issue that is causing or may cause political penalties to build.
This analysis begins with a focus on high emotion-low policy threshold (HELP) issues like shark bite incidents, which are rare or random expected attention issues that people care about because their occurrence can signal an instinctual threat or prolonged distress. This category is the chief focus of this chapter. Highly emotional issues are given intentionally low thresholds that quicken the response process in order to (a) limit the access of competing actors, (b) provide emotional relief to limit exposure to political pressures, and (c) prejudice causal narratives and policy responses. These issues and events have traditionally weak policy subsystems designed as such to facilitate quick policy responses, including emotional relief, by single actors or policy entrepreneurs who are under pressure from political penalties.
analyzing high emotion-low Policy threShold iSSueS
Highly emotional issues with weak threshold arrangements are a unique type of political issue in agenda setting and policy formation. A pattern can be seen in the way the public mobilizes in different ways around highly emotional issues and events to put pressures on political actors. Specifically, attention is rationed by government officials (Simon 1996) based on the distribution of penalties. Highly emotional issues and events rise on the agenda based on presence of an emotional-political-temporal overlap, where there is an interaction around a problem that matters, to the people that matter, during a time that matters. This compound problem distributes penalties relative to the immediacy or sustainability of the penalty and the strength of the policy domain.
This combination of penalizing factors can be seen in a range of recent situations. Waldorf (2012, 469) notes that the Kony 2012 video released via YouTube on 5 March 2012 (Bal et al. 2013) focused attention on the actions of militia leader Joseph Kony, which “prompted 100 million people and prominent US politicians to engage with an issue that had been crowded off the policy agenda.” The filmmakers accomplished this by “translating compassion into action” (Waldorf 2012, 471). By April 2012,
President Obama responded by authorizing 100 Special Operations troops to assist in the search for Kony (Gettleman 2012). Quick responses to hotbutton policy issues can also be seen in parliamentary systems like Australia. Tiplady et al. (2013) reviewed government actions in June 2011 following a television program documenting animal cruelty toward livestock in Indonesian abattoirs. They surveyed public emotional responses to the reports and found “pity” for the cattle the most common response (Tiplady et al. 2013, 876). Within days of the media program running, 160,000 signatures were delivered to the Federal Parliament (Tiplady et al. 2013, 871) and the government suspended livestock exports by the end of the week. To isolate the nature of high emotion-low policy threshold cases, a consideration of key characteristics is needed. I propose the following.
Fast Policy Responses and Intent
First, highly emotional issues are fast. They are prioritized differently in the agenda-setting process by people and governments. Attention is distributed differently around negative emotional feelings because these can come from instinctual or primal sources that produce faster, automatic responses that prioritize the importance of certain types of issues over others (Zajonc 1984; McDermott et al. 2008). This can be seen regarding threats related to mortality, reproduction, and intentional harm (Decety and Cacioppo 2012), which trigger extinction prevention responses. Therefore, it is expected that instinctual high emotion-high salience issues will have a low tolerance of acceptance in order to continue existing. Moreover, biologically threatening issues transcend cultural differences and are more accessible and available than other issues, making their spread easier. They are more commonly understood and are more likely to catch on with the public. In addition, understanding threatening issues provides survival value, which attracts the media and contributes to the issue’s salience, making these biologically attention-grabbing events more attractive to news outlets focusing public attention even further and in a broader way.
High emotion-high policy threshold (HEHP) issues are culturally hotbutton or international topics that people care about and for which the threshold for opening the policy process is high. These matters are noted in the upper-left corner of Fig. 3.1 and are distinguished based on three factors. First, they are issues with a high degree of emotion attached to
them. Secondly, because of the intensity around them, there are strong policy subsystems and contested parties that govern their openness. Thirdly, these prioritized emotional issues encourage policies and structures that alleviate emotional distress through a prolonged period of policy stasis, with institutional controls that seek to avoid frequent attention to the dreaded outcomes. This distributes the political emotionality of the issue over time and populations, and provides relief to the public because these issues are perceived as largely settled public policies.
Low emotion-high policy threshold (LEHP) issues are perceived as intractable, with no feasible solution as a way to engender apathy from the public. In these cases, the dreaded outcomes from the issues do not emotionally resonate with the public and there are high thresholds for policy action due to the lack of compelling causal stories or feasible solutions. These are issue areas where the outcome may be severe; however, the lack of a visible, available, and resonant connection means that even where policy subsystems are strong, the lack of an issue that matters restricts the timing of policy opportunities and encourages policy stasis. The lack of temporal or political availability is reinforced by the emotional relief provided by attention biases against prioritizing the issues.
Finally, I describe low emotion-low policy threshold (LELP) issues as those punitive issues which the public may not feel strongly about (such as private drug use, immigration, polygamy, voter fraud, and political sex scandals); however, attention to the issue can change the emotional quotient. This results in a low threshold that encourages policy responses because they involve negatively constructed or marginalized populations (Schneider and Ingram 1993). Stoked by context and attention, these issues can represent moral panics, with policies intended to send a message (Goode and Ben-Yehuda 1994). Here, there are traditionally weak policy subsystems that make these issues susceptible to individual leaders.
In all, this framework can help illustrate the way political emotionality can distribute penalties and the way policy thresholds are used to facilitate or maintain policy windows as a means of protecting actors from vulnerable situations. The emotion-policy threshold shows that these two incidents fall into different categories, HELP and HEHP in large measure, because the emotionality of the situations did not distribute penalties to all actors; the higher threshold in the US was maintained due to penalties imposed by gun-rights advocates. In addition, there are a number of key differences that contributed to varying distributions of the penalties within the policy domains.
Finally, it is important to note the way pressures from these aversive problem conditions encourage vulnerable actors (i.e. politicians functioning as policy entrepreneurs) to select quickly adoptable measures that provide policy as therapy. Looking at the policy process in this manner helps illustrate the role of mitigating emotional political situations, which has implications for broader policy analysis. In short, utilizing this framework, you would not expect similar events to have the same speed and type of policy response unless they had similar sensibilities, distributions of penalties, and common perceptions of positive policy solutions.
The emotion-policy threshold framework is a heuristic to assist in analyzing how policy arrangements are designed to distribute emotionality in ways that protect political actors during vulnerable periods of time. Or put another way, this framework looks at how those in power keep power in the face of politically dangerous environments. There are a number of implications for policy analysis from this proposal.
Policy domains create higher thresholds by requiring multiple levels of authority to open the policy process and implement policy responses. High-policy thresholds are used to insulate politically costly issues, either because they are emotional issues that reflect cultural divides or because solving the problem is too politically difficult. Response time plays a key role here, as lower policy thresholds with fewer actors are designed to be faster than high thresholds with more actors. Lower thresholds rely on weak political resistance structures, with concentrated power among a limited number of actors. These low thresholds are designed to provide political benefit by addressing certain distressing situations or punishing relegated groups. Importantly, the opening of the policy window is designed to control the process by quickly inserting a policy response that is intended to mitigate the emotionality, attentive focus, and political penalty, thereby closing the window and the process. Differences in perceived penalties may inform differences in policy responses and policy thresholds.
Looking at policy analysis from this perspective makes it possible to critique politicians and the policy process more completely. The emotionpolicy threshold framework highlights the role of political penalties and vulnerabilities that may contribute to certain policy actions or inactions. I argue that elected actors are often aware of the potential political penalties that will undermine their position and establish threshold arrangements for specific issues based on expected penalty repertoires. The policy entrepreneur then is not simply the actor who champions a bill or an idea but
the person most vulnerable to the political penalty. In addition, the policy window is not about opening the political process but about closing the process. Under this analysis, the solution to the problem is to interrupt public emotion, salience, and penalties. Identifying these variables in policy analysis means that policy responses to relieve public anxiety, mass protests, leadership tensions, or other threats to political survival can be judged on these bases. This also allows for the discussion and consideration of alternatives that accomplish the same goal.
A discussion of political emotionality in policymaking allows for a greater critique of emotional taxation, placebo politics, policy as therapy, and seemingly knee-jerk responses. The focus on thresholds and ways to control the policy process by opening policy windows provides a way to critique political strategies that induce crises and low thresholds as a governing strategy. This research highlights how emotions help facilitate or extinguish social mobilizations. Political organizing can extinguish itself on the basis of political emotionality and randomness. It becomes difficult to organize between periods of highly emotional events and sustain organizing around socially averse and emotionally taxing (Pepin-Neff and Caporale 2018) situations.
In all, this analysis suggests the potential for manipulation of the political system that requires further study. Indeed, the focus on some of the emotionality around issues can be constructed in an illusory manner by governments, the media, or other political actors, making the issue public perception. It also lends itself to periods of crisis-induced policymaking to control the process, can ignore the underlying problem (thus, making it worse), mislead the public, and direct resources against a false target.
concluSion
I have proposed an emotion-policy threshold framework to analyze the way governments establish policy thresholds and institutional arrangements given relative degrees of emotionality, salience, and political vulnerability. The political arena is an emotional ecosystem with patterns and cycles. In this environment, affect-laden political issues can present a threat to powerful actors and encourage the design of institutions and narratives to pre-emptively protect against intense responses to predictable or expected emotional events. This chapter has taken a theoretical position to suggest how governments attempt to govern emotion. Policy thresholds play a key role in this process, since political actors have established formal
C. L. PEPIN-NEFF
sets of laws, informal norms, and political rituals to diffuse emotional issues in the policy process. Political actors establish thresholds for issues to try and avoid the circumstances under which people care a lot about an issue, how many people care, and for how long. This is done by changing the type and speed of policy responses. As a result, policy thresholds are designed to be high or low based, in part, on the emotional sensitivity of the issue and the penalties decision-makers face from the public.
I now turn to the three case studies in Florida, Cape Town, and Australia that provide tangible examples of emotionality, salience, policy entrepreneurship, and policy thresholds. Each one is reviewed to see the way flaws play into each story, with sharks portrayed as the enemy, shark bites referred to as intentional shark attacks, and responses seemingly responsive to public safety needs.
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