Fear, anger, pride and other emotions are a key element in politics. Yet our systematic knowledge of the role that they play in EU governance and policy-making remains limited. Existing research on the role of emotions in social movements mobilization has up until now focused on the micro-level (individual or collective political behavior). There is currently not much knowledge on the impact of emotions on public policy and governance at the macro-level. Establishing for the first time an original link between emotions in dynamics of contestation and public policy analysis, I argue that emotions help explaining policy outcomes, governance architectures and the capacity to ensure public consent through several causal mechanisms. To better grasp the context-dependent effects of emotions and to identify relevant causal mechanisms, I propose an elaborated combination of qualitative methods including a comparative qualitative case study and process-tracing. This paper first provides the theoretical foundations and the theoretical framework for the analysis of the link between the micro and the macro level while analyzing emotions in policy-making. Secondly, this paper proposes a methodology adapted to grasp the complex and fluid role of dynamics of contestation and emotions in policy-making. This paper will also provide some illustrative evidence on the role of emotions in dynamics of contestation in the current EU discussions regarding the refugee crisis, comparing the use of emotions by solidarity groups, xenophobic groups and populist political parties.
