Lessons from the Interpretive Emotions Analysis for the Advocacy Coalition Framework

Everything is verbalized and textual. We see this through all aspects of government, be it politics, policy, and administration, where we write policies, debate and persuade over texts, and discuss through language the norms and strategies that shape and are shaped by behaviors. All of these are performative, meaning the words people write and say both represent and inform traces of their thoughts, emotions, choices, and interactions. In the policy sciences, this is true for mainstream quantitative and qualitative work as well as work in the interpretive and critical policy studies. In all these instances, scholars observe textual data and say what it means. We are in a "meaning" making turn and, as a scholarly community of public policy, we need to capitalize on this and embrace the different ways of understanding social reality. This paper illustrates how we can bring more of the study of meaning in policy scholarship by taking lessons from an area of interpretive and critical policy scholarship – Interpretive Emotions Analysis – and applying them to a mainstream theoretical approach – the Advocacy Coalition Framework. In doing so, we draw on interpretive methods while focusing on the analysis of emotions more specifically to better understand the underlying conflicts and coalition interactions. We also tackle some of the ongoing issues dogging Advocacy Coalition Framework scholarship, particularly its reductionist approach to data collection. We illustrate the insights in a brief illustrative case of abortion politics in Austria and end this paper with the most pressing research questions for moving forward.