We empirically explore the drive towards emotionalization in policy narratives in a highly technical, yet  polarized, policy debate: the Farm to Fork strategy (F2F) of the EU. We do so by leveraging the Narrative  Policy Framework (NPF) and applying it to the official policy narrative of the Hungarian Government  (opposing F2F). We first develop expectations drawing on the literature on populism and the NPF. For  example, we expect correlations between NPF categories and emotions. The villain should be associated  with anger and fear, the victim with compassion-empathy, the hero with pride. The plot can have different  emotional associations. The doomsday should be discursively represented to elicit fear. Next, we build a  corpus of more than 800 units suitable for coding. This corpus is coded first at the level of NPF categories,  then for the presence-absence of emotions and, when present, the exact type of emotions. Human coding  is benchmarked against a large language model developed in the MORES project. We find that Hungary  articulates its F2F position with emotional narratives. When politically feasible, the narrative contains  rhetorical entrapment, asking the Commission to account for the lack of evidence-based tests. The  association NPF category-emotion works well. There is not much difference in terms of the audience, but  there are differences when Hungary speaks on behalf of the Visegrad countries. Methodologically, we find  that manual coding is superior because emotions are not elicited by single words but by semantics. It is the  way meanings are constructed in a sentence or a story that triggers emotional reactions in the audience. Our  findings contribute to the narrative policy framework by specifying how emotions exactly map onto  characters, narrators, and the overall narrative. We also make a small methodological contribution to the  discussion about large language models, dictionary approaches to emotions, and human coding. 

Speaker 

Claudio M. Radaelli, EUI

A political scientist specialised in public policy, Claudio Radaelli (BSc in Economics and Social Sciences, Bocconi, PhD in political science, University of Florence) joined the Florence School of Transnational Governance as Professor in September 2020. His research interests include the policy process of the European Union, policy learning, the roles and usages of expertise and policy narratives in public policy and administration, regulation and regulatory analysis tools. 
Professor Radaelli was awarded two advanced grants by the European Research Council. He co-authored Designing Rulemaking: How Regulatory Policy Instruments Matter for Governance (OUP, 2024) and co-edited with Fabrizio De Francesco The Elgar Companion to the OECD (Elgar, 2023).

He is currently engaged in two Horizon Projects, MORES (on Moral Emotions in Politics) and RADAR (Renewing Administration through Democratic Anchorage Reforms). At the School, he teaches MA and Executive Education Courses on public policy and regulation. He is the Academic Director of the Policy Leader Fellowship (PLF) program. Claudio is a member of the Executive Committee of the International Public Policy Association and chief editor of the International Review of Public Policy.

Chair 

Patrick Le Galès, Sciences Po, CEE, CNRS

Discussant

Maria Katrina Bianca Cortez, Sciences Po, CEE