How are emotions and beliefs expressed in legislative testimonies? An advocacy coalition approach

Abstract

While emotions are an inherent component of the human experience that influence behavior, values, and beliefs, they have largely been left out of policy process studies theoretically and methodologically. Using the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), with its focus on how individuals coalesce into coalitions around a set of common beliefs, we begin to situate emotions as a critical component of belief systems and discourse about public policies. This study analyzes legislative testimony from four policies debated during the 2021 Colorado Legislative Session using discourse analysis to identify the emotions and coalitional beliefs. We find that policy actors express emotions and beliefs similarly to other policy actors in the same coalition and differently from policy actors in the opposing coalition. We conclude this paper by discussing the theoretical and methodological contributions of including emotions in the ACF. The move to incorporate the analysis of emotional expressions, and hence the study of affect, into the ACF mirrors the ongoing incorporation of how people feel in politics and not just how they think.

Examining emotional belief expressions of advocacy coalitions in Arkansas' gender identity politics

“…4 Applications of the ACF number in the hundreds, spanning the globe (Aamodt, 2018;Milhorance et al, 2021;Osei-Kojo et al, 2022;Ruysschaert & Hufty, 2020;Satoh et al, 2023) in prior both democratic and non-democratic governance arrangements (Li & Weible, 2021). It continues to forward diverse methods (Elgin & Weible, 2013;Satoh et al, 2023;Weible & Workman, 2022) and hosts several applications of emotional expressions in advocacy coalitions (Fullerton et al, 2023;Gabehart et al, 2023). Additionally, there exists one ACF application about the inclusion of transgender policies into lesbian and gay advocacy coalitions (Taylor & Lewis, 2014).…”

“…For our analysis, we use Emotional Belief Analysis (EBA) which is a coding approach used in past ACF applications of newsmedia (Fullerton et al, 2023) and legislative testimony (Gabehart et al, 2023). Similar to other ACF coalition studies, the documents are coded for their narrating actor (who is speaking), the emotion-belief actor (who is experiencing the emotion and belief), the belief (what they are speaking about), and the emotion attached to the belief.…”

“…After identifying the beliefs, we coded the associated emotion words, which are identified explicitly and implicitly in the text and then placed into parent categories utilizing an emotional thesaurus. This study used eight emotional categories: anger, carelessness, dismay, fear, affinity, confidence, content, 11 and trust (adapted from Fullerton et al, 2023;Gabehart et al, 2023;Yordy et al, 2023). The thesaurus built for this study 12 has 513 emotion words categorized into the above eight emotional categories.…”

“…Policy studies increasingly incorporate emotions in various ways to understand better a range of questions, from why people engage in policy to how people make sense of their world to how power or legitimacy manifests through emotions. For example, recent efforts include work in the narrative policy framework ( Jones, 2014;Pierce, 2021;Pierce et al, 2024;Zanocco et al, 2018), agenda setting (Merry & Mattingly, 2024), and the advocacy coalition framework (ACF) (Fullerton et al, 2023;Gabehart et al, 2023). Emotions have long been mentioned explicitly-though often in an underdeveloped way-or implicitly in the foundation of policy process theories.…”

“…However, similar to much of the policy theories previously mentioned, the ACF has mostly neglected to incorporate emotions explicitly as part of its model of the individual. Recently (Fullerton et al, 2023;Gabehart et al, 2023) developed the needed theoretical or methodological foundations for advancing knowledge about how emotions can contribute to the ACF and policy process research more broadly, and reciprocally, how the ACF can contribute to the study of emotions. This paper builds on these foundations with more developed theories and methods for applying an emotional analysis within the ACF.…”