Emotional Responsiveness in an Age of Insecurity A Conceptual Proposal and a Research Agenda

Abstract

Policy responsiveness to the preferences of the citizen’s has been a major topos of academic discussions in political science in recent years. Much ink has been spilled on questions like whether responsiveness should be considered a major part of democratic representation, to what extent governments actually are responsive to citizens and to which groups. What these accounts have in common is that they usually focus on material policies to study representation. In this article, I argue that while this perspective is of great importance, it leaves out an important part of politics – emotions. According to my argument, this is problematic especially in an age of insecurity when threats and anxiety increasingly dominate politics. Therefore, bringing together theories of representation, insights from political psychology, political communication research and policy studies I develop a conceptual approach to studying emotional responsiveness and set out a research agenda for empirical studying this additional linkage between citizens and politics.