Emotions as a Measure of the Intractability of Policy Conflict: An ACF-EBA Analysis of Wolf Reintroduction in Colorado

Conflict is endemic to policy-making in any kind of political regime, and conflict is important to a functioning political system. Recently, however, many political systems have experienced a deterioration in functional conflict. Conflict is shaped by power structures and institutions, and can be driven by its emotional dimensions. Politics are often emotionally charged and thereby polarizing, obstructing rational decision-making and contributing to the entrenchment of “wicked” policy problems. As politics and emotions polarize politics at an increasing rate (Webster and Albertson, 2022), it is imperative that we learn more about the role of emotion-laden discourse within these conflicts. Empirical work in policy process research has established the pervasive influence of discourse on several aspects of policymaking: coalition formation and maintenance, individual belief establishment, friction in policy adoption, narrative strategy, and much more. Until recently, however, the field has not thoroughly examined the role of emotions within policy discourse, perhaps because we lacked the tools required to tackle this difficult concept and measurement. Recent methodological advancements have paved the way to unpack the role of emotions in policy discourse. The research presented here investigates the link between emotion-laden discourse and conflict, exploring how Emotion Belief Analysis (EBA) can be used to capture a commonly desired outcome of policy studies: conflict. We ask How can we measure conflict through emotions in discourse? Using the case of wolf reintroduction in the US state of Colorado, we examine news media and legislative testimony from 2020-2024. We find that intractability of conflict can be measured by examining how much emotional discourse is shared or not shared between competing coalitions, as this reveals where there might be clashing ontologies or, instead, possibilities for compromise. We also propose a typology of conflict situations based on this research. This research contributes methodological advancement surrounding the measurement of emotion-laden discourse to capture policy conflict and explores the viability of this approach to expand to other contexts and issue areas.