Consultations are often conceptualized as rational information exchange. Policymakers give access to the policymaking process in exchange for technical or political information. Our paper proposes a complementary way of analyzing consultations: They are also venues for expressing emotions about public policies. We test two simple hypotheses: First, citizens statements to consultations are more emotional. Second, contributions mentioning concrete policy measures contain more emotions than contributions referring to the abstract policy framework. We test our hypotheses using a dictionary-based sentiment coding of ~7300 contributions to the consultation of German electricity grid construction plan. Our analysis corroborates both hypotheses: Citizens responses are more emotional, especially voicing fear. Moreover, if contributions refer to a specific power line, they contain less joy, but more fear and sadness. Thus, our paper shows a way to conceptualize and measure the link between public policies and the emotions that they trigger.
