(Dis)incentives, Features and Outcomes. The Threefold Relationship Between Deliberative Democratic Innovations and Participant’s ‘Bag of Emotions’

Since the ‘affective turn’ in social science, it is widely acknowledged that politics stir people’s emotions, and, vice versa, people’s resulting affects guide how they relate to politics. This new perspective however sits uncomfortable with the strictly procedural and rational decision-making logics of many institutions of contemporary representative democracies. Political elites and policymakers tend to rationalize – or dismiss – emotionality, increasingly favouring a technocratic approach to politics. Yet ‘strong emotions’ often signal underlying social, political, or economic crises and can convey strong messages about what matters, is valued, desired or needed by the people expressing them to the extent of fostering positive engagement in the politics of ‘us’ building. Building on this premise, an avenue worth exploring in order to identify new ways of harnessing the value of emotionality in the policy process is to look at deliberative practices. While we already know that individual and shared emotions partially bridge different values and identities in deliberative practices, insight is still embryonic about how and through which democratic innovations and interventions ‘democratic desirable’ emotional outcomes could be furthered. This paper combines an explanatory review of the literature with semi-structured interviews with practitioners and experts in democratic innovations to map the existing knowledge about deliberative democratic innovations and emotions. We designed the interview guide to explore specific areas based on the gaps we identified in the literature review. We asked experts and practitioners to reflect on the academic state of the art, but also to give us insights into their understanding of how emotions are regarded and dealt with in practice. In so doing we establish and explore a new research agenda that could in turn inform future initiatives to enhance the link between citizens, policymakers and political elites through deliberative practices. Our approach highlights the need for extended theoretical and empirical work exploring this threefold relationship. Our choice of methods also allows to account for the particular threefold relationship that emotions have with deliberative democratic innovations, i.e. they are (dis)incentive to participate and engage with as well as features and outcomes of deliberative practices. More specifically, our results highlight the need to develop new practices geared to triggering emotional mechanisms of social sharing, which are operationalized through the sharing of specific emotions, major concerns or emotional repression. Such mechanisms are likely to be triggered in collective spheres where affective practices that cater for emotional reflexivity to.