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Governing Emotion: How to Analyze Emotional Political Situations

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Abstract

This chapter introduces a high emotion-low policy threshold (HELP) framework and reviews how emotions are seen to work together in the modern history of policy responses and can be applied to shark bites. It demonstrates how circumstances can present situations that distribute penalties to political actors when there is a high degree of emotion and salience based on the instinctual nature of the threat, intent-based causal story, and policy entrepreneurship. I suggest that political actors responded to these situations by addressing the political penalty, which usually involved redistributing public emotionality.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Christopher L. Pepin-Neff

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  1. Christopher L. Pepin-Neff
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Pepin-Neff, C.L. (2019). Governing Emotion: How to Analyze Emotional Political Situations. In: Flaws. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10976-9_3

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