Emotions and the making of protective policies

This literature review examines the state of the art on two related research areas: on protective policies and on emotions related to politics as well as on political communication and policy-making. Both reviews deliver important insights into main debates in the respective strands: On protective policies, the analysis shows that the concept itself has not been used widely, whereas protection is mentioned repeatedly in articles related to specific policy areas, such as social protection, environmental protection or health protection. Hence, combing the insights from these different areas can lead to an enhanced understanding of the cross-cuttingness of protection, which will be further explored in PROTEMO. With regard to emotion in the realm of politics, scholars have extensively investigated the affective dimensions of political behaviour and political communication. However, with some exceptions, extensive empirical studies on the concrete role of emotion in the process of policy-making are missing from the academic literature. PROTEMO addresses this lack and thereby contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of policy-making in an era of multiple insecurities.Finally, drawing together the results of the two parts, the review yields several important insights about possible interlinkages, namely on the target groups of protection, the origin of protection, the assessment of the need of protection, providers of protection, policy instruments providing protection, drivers of protection and the time horizon related to protection. These insights can inform a theoretical conceptualization of protective policies as well as guide the development of hypotheses on how emotions affect the policy-making process on protective policies and vice versa.