In public consultations, policymakers give stakeholders access to the policymaking process in exchange for technical or political information. Our article proposes to analyze not only the policy positions, but the emotional content of consultation contributions. In our descriptive study, we explore two conjectures: First, citizens contributions to public consultations display more emotions than contributions by corporate actors, and second, contributions mentioning concrete policies display more emotions than contributions referring to the abstract policy framework. We use dictionary-based sentiment coding to analyze ~ 7300 contributions to the consultation of German electricity grid construction planning. Our analysis shows that citizens’ contributions contain more emotional terms, especially voicing fear. Moreover, if contributions refer to a specific power line, they contain less joy, but more fear and sadness. Thus, we show a way to conceptualize and measure the link between public policies and the emotions they trigger.

在公共咨询中，决策者让利益相关者参与决策过程，以换取技术或政治信息。我们的文章建议不仅分析政策立场，还要分析咨询贡献的情感内容。在我们的描述性研究中，我们探讨了两个猜想：首先，公民对公共咨询的贡献比企业参与者的贡献表现出更多的情感；其次，提及具体政策的贡献比涉及抽象政策框架的贡献表现出更多的情感。我们使用基于字典的情感编码来分析约 7300 份对德国电网建设规划咨询的贡献。我们的分析表明，公民的贡献包含更多情感术语，尤其是表达恐惧。此外，如果捐款涉及特定的电力线，那么它们包含的喜悦就会减少，而会增加恐惧和悲伤。因此，我们展示了一种概念化和衡量公共政策与其引发的情绪之间联系的方法。