Patterns of emotionalization in Farm to Fork policy narratives

Public discourse is often imagined as rationality, data, and substantial deference toward science. Yet, in real-world policy processes, scientists are looked at with increasing suspicion and public discourse has tilted toward irrationality, becoming more polarized, angry, and simplistic (Haidt 2022). In our contribution, we empirically test the drive towards emotionalization in policy narratives in a highly technical, yet highly polarized, policy debate: the Farm to Fork strategy (F2F) of the European Union. We do so by leveraging the Narrative Policy Framework and applying it to two contrasting narratives that have emerged around F2F, the official European Commission narrative and the narrative of the Hungarian Government (opposing F2F) In a first step, by manually coding the relevant corpora, we reconstruct and compare the structures of the two narratives in terms of basic NPF elements (setting, plot, characters and morale). In a second step, we employ the NPF-annotated corpora to perform an automated analysis of the emotional content of the narratives. Drawing on this two-pronged analysis, we produce findings on the different structural elements of the two narratives, the emotions elicited by narrators, and how emotions are linked to or evoked by different characters. For example, does the hero elicit joy? Is the category of the villain connected to fear or anger? Does the victim trigger empathy? To add depth to the analysis of emotions within narratives, we perform the same kind of analysis on a corpus of narrative interviews conducted on a sample of vulnerable farmers and stakeholders coming from all the EU member states allowing us to test the hypothesis whether policy narratives are more/less emotional than bottom-up, popular narratives. The findings contribute to the narrative policy framework by specifying how emotions exactly map onto characters, narrators, and the overall narrative.