Soziologie

Sonja Blum and Nora Habelitz have published two new articles as part of their research in the Horizon Europe project "CIDAPE" (Climate, Inequality, and Democratic Action: The Force of Political Emotions).

The first article, written together with Johanna Kuhlmann, University of Bremen, is "How Do Policy Narratives Evoke Emotions? An Appraisal-Theoretic Approach". The authors argue that appraisal theory's emotion-process components - such as goal relevance, agency, control, and norm congruence - map onto the structural elements of policy narratives identified by the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) and can clarify how distinct emotions are evoked in policy narratives. The paper focuses on the emotion of anger and illustrates how anger-driven policy narratives can be empirically analyzed. 

The second article titled "Energized? How German and Italian Party Actors Used Emotions in Energy Policy Narratives During the 2024 Elections" was co-authored with Fabienne Lind, University of Vienna. Drawing on social media data from the CIDAPE project and applying specific emotion dictionaries, the article investigates how German and Italian parties used emotions in energy policy communication during the 2024 European Parliament elections. Findings show a dominance of "positive" emotions ("affinity" and "compassion"), with however notable differences between parties' narrative emotionalization strategies.

Both articles are open access and emerged from Work Package 2 at Bielefeld University, which investigates emotional policy narratives around climate policy and their inequality dimension.

Blum, S., Kuhlmann, J., & Habelitz, N. (2026). How Do Policy Narratives Evoke Emotions? An Appraisal-Theoretic Approach. Policy Studies Journal, e70135. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.70135

Habelitz, N., Lind, F., & Blum, S. (2026). Energized? How German and Italian Party Actors Used Emotions in Energy Policy Narratives During the 2024 EU Elections. European Policy Analysis, 12(3), e70048. https://doi.org/10.1002/epa2.70048