While a rational comprehensive approach to policy is now seen as naiive in explaining how policy is decided upon, only now are we really delving into the role of emotions in policy making…..good times in my discipline.

Miller-McCune, our neighbors to the immediate north, have a nice summary of recent research on the role of anger in mobilizing voters. As one of the scholars summarized puts it:

Anger gets people engaged…. There’s a tendency among scholars and others to say that things like negative advertising are bad. But our paper points out that negative emotions like anger can bring people out and get people more involved. So the consequences aren’t all bad.

This gets us to a key tension in civic engagement. We want people to participate in politics, but we don’t spend much time thinking about how they should participate. All the efforts aimed at GOTV efforts (here’s a good local example) presume that voters know their interests and automatically express them when they go to vote. But I question whether a politics driven by outrage and anger produces good policy outcomes.

The great challenge is to get politics to be about other emotions. While anger has its place, it is not the only, or even the best emotion to employ when thinking about public life. I think the central conceit of representative democracy whereby the “best and the brightest” filter out the passion and anger of the masses through deliberation and compromise has its value, but a core downfall is that it doesn’t place much obligation on citizens to be reasonable or civil.

In that case, how do you introduce these other emotions into civic life. For example, how do you talk about a “politics of love” without sounding like some sort of irrelevant crunchy peacenik. It is here where public life is at its most partriarchal. The only allowable feelings to express in public discourse are traditionally masculine ones. But we know from life that anger has to be controlled or kept in check. We don’t seem to hold those same standards in public discourse. Instead suggesting and anger towards government is good and a sign of “caring” about civic life. If anger and stress have negative health effects on the body, it’s possible that they also have negative health effects on the body politic.