Bringing Emotions into the Study of Responsiveness: The Case of Protective Policies

Research on representation and responsiveness is based on the idea that voters have concerns about certain policy problems and that representatives respond to these concerns with concrete policy outputs, such as laws. In addition, once adopted, this policy output can feed back on voters’ concerns which are then satisfied. Consequently, citizens do not demand more of the respective policy (negative feedback, thermostatic model (Soroka & Wlezien 2010)) or are, in contrast, incited toward demanding even more of the policy (positive feedback, policy overreaction (Maor 2014, Jones et al 2014)). In this research note, I argue that by focussing mainly on such preference-policy linkages, existing research has underestimated the role emotions play in this “chain of responsiveness” (Powell 2004), especially when it comes to protective policies, that is policies that are presented as providing protection to citizens. I propose an amended concept of responsiveness which adds an emotional layer to the existing framework and present an empirical exploration on the emotion-policy link on the micro level using data from the European Social Survey which indicates the fruitfulness to bring in emotions more plainly into the literature on responsiveness.