Report on Design Principles for Emotion Sensitive Policy Making

PLEDGE brings theory and practice together and generates tools to promote effective policy-making and communication that will enhance emotionally intelligent and responsive democratic governance. This report lays the foundations for such a democratic design approach. To map the existing knowledge about deliberative democratic innovations and emotions, it combines an explanatory review of the literature with semi-structured interviews with international practitioners and experts in the field. In so doing, we establish and explore a new research agenda, with the potential to inform future initiatives that will enhance the link between citizens, policymakers and political elites through deliberative practices. We identified a threefold relationship that emotions have with deliberative democratic innovations: (i) emotions are (dis)incentives to participate and commit to deliberation; (ii) emotions are features of deliberative practices; and (iii) emotions are outcomes of deliberative practices. This report discusses these three dimensions with eyes fixed on the development of emotion-sensitive democratic innovations, and reflects on practices that further the emotional mechanism of solidarity-oriented sharing to occur.