How Do Policy Narratives Evoke Emotions? An Appraisal‐Theoretic Approach
2026-06-18
Research on policy narratives acknowledges the crucial role that emotions play within communication and sense‐making. Especially the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) has placed emotion at the center of attention and stressed that affect‐imbued stories are key for how individuals make sense of the world and navigate through the policy process. Still, narrative scholars have only recently started to investigate emotions more thoroughly, and a systematic understanding of how policy narratives evoke distinct emotions—such as anger, fear, trust, or compassion—is lacking. How are emotions linked to different narrative elements, and how do they contribute to the emotional appeal of a narrative? In this perspectives note , we draw on appraisal theory from psychology to answer these questions: We argue that appraisal theory's emotion‐process components—such as goal relevance, agency, control, and norm congruence—map onto the structural elements of policy narratives identified by the NPF and can clarify how distinct emotions are evoked in policy narratives. We demonstrate the usefulness of an appraisal‐informed NPF by focusing on the emotion of anger and illustrating how anger‐driven policy narratives can be empirically analyzed.