Kamkhaji, Jonathan and Radaelli, Claudio M (2025) Patterns of Emotionalisation in Policy Narratives. Working Paper. MORES Working Paper Series, 3. (Unpublished)
|
Text
working_paper_3_21Nov2025-final-b.pdf Available under license Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives. Download (4MB) | Preview |
Abstract
We empirically explore the drive towards emotionalisation in policy narratives in a highly technical, yet polarised, policy debate: the Farm to Fork strategy (F2F) of the EU. We do so by leveraging the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) and applying it to the official statements of the Hungarian Government (opposing F2F). We first develop expectations drawing on the literature. For example, we expect correlations between NPF categories and emotions. The villain should be associated with anger and fear, the victim with compassion-empathy, the hero with pride. The plot can have different emotional associations. The doomsday should be discursively represented to elicit fear. Next, we built a corpus of 53 narratives decomposed into 794 sentences. This corpus is coded first at the level of NPF categories, then for the presence-absence of emotions and, when present, the exact type of emotion. Human coding is benchmarked against a large language model developed in the MORES project. We find that Hungary articulates its F2F position with emotional narratives bereft of empirical substance. When it is politically feasible, Hungary goes for rhetorical entrapment, asking the Commission to account for the lack of evidence-based tests and impact studies. The association NPF category-emotion works well, especially at the level of characters like the hero, the victim, and the villain. Our findings contribute to the NPF by specifying exactly how emotions map onto characters, narrators, and the overall narrative.
| Item Type: | Monograph (Working Paper) |
|---|---|
| Title in English: | Patterns of Emotionalisation in Policy Narratives |
| Keywords in English: | Discourse, Emotions, Farm to Fork, Green Deal, Hungary, Narrative Policy Framework |
| Subjects: | J Political Science > JA Political science (General) |
| Divisions: | Institute for Political Science |
| Research funder: | European Union (EU), MORES project, grant no. 101132601 |
| Depositing User: | Enikő Meiszterics |
| Date Deposited: | 24 Nov 2025 10:40 |
| Last Modified: | 24 Nov 2025 10:40 |
| Related papers or data collections: |
Boda, Zsolt
(2025)
Moral Emotions in Politics - How they unite, how they divide?
[Data Collection]
Horst, Dorothea and Scherer, Thomas J. J. (2024) Visionen in der Krise: Deutsche Spitzenkandida innen zur Europawahl 2024 Visions in Crisis: German Lead Candidates for the European Elections 2024. Mediaesthetics – Journal of Poetics of Audiovisual Images, (5). ISSN 2567-9309 Boda, Zsolt and Ring, Orsolya and Szabó, Gabriella (2024) What kinds of emotions are mobilised by different policy fields? A text mining analysis of parliamentary speeches. Working Paper. MORES Working Paper Series, 1. (Unpublished) Metz, Rudolf and Plesz, Bendegúz (2025) The Irresistible Allure of Charismatic Leaders? Populism, Social Identity, and Polarisation. Politics and Governance, 2025 (13). ISSN 2183-2463 Hadarics, Márton and Krekó, Péter (2024) Nothing to see here, move along! Illiberal contexts as catalyzers of authoritarian misperception of democratic quality. Political Psychology. Kamkhaji, Jonathan and Radaelli, Claudio M (2025) Behaviour in Public Administration: In Search of Foundational Insights. In: The Humanities and Public Administration; An Introduction. Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd, pp. 79-93. Metz, Rudolf (2025) (Don't) fear the bad leader: three influential myths about bad leadership. Frontiers in Political Science, 2025 (7). ISSN 2673-3145 Scherer, Thomas and Beichelt, Timm and Illger, Daniel (2025) Inventing an alternative: Populist imaginations of political leaders in audiovisual culture. Working Paper. MORES Working Paper Series, 2. (Unpublished) Patkós, Veronika and Plesz, Bendegúz (2025) Does political polarisation undermine democratic accountability? Evidence from 28 European democracies. West European Politics. pp. 1-33. Krekó, Péter (2025) The Rise of the Authoritarian Populist Right: The Illiberal Defenders of Freedom? Brown Journal of World Affairs, XXXI (II). Sík, Endre and Krekó, Péter (2025) Hungary as an Ideological Informational Autocracy (IA) and the Moral Panic Button (MPB) as its Basic Institution. Central and Eastern European Migration Review. pp. 1-17. |
| URI: | https://openarchive.tk.mta.hu/id/eprint/653 |
Actions (login required)
 |
View Item |
