Researching and understanding emotion in policymaking

This chapter draws on an ethnographic research project that formed the basis of a doctoral thesis in politics. I set out with a very broad and fundamental research problem to investigate what people who make policy are referring to when they talk about emotion in their working lives. I had been a policy officer in non-governmental organisations (NGOs) for several years prior to beginning my thesis, and this question was drawn from my own experience trying – and failing – to account for the place of the relational and the ‘emotional’ in making policy decisions. As this chapter will explain, understandings and practices around activism, particular claims about knowledge and moral agency and the idea of the ‘emotional’ were closely tied together in the context of the policy processes my research describes, at least according to the people who participated in that work.

Ethnography that takes place within a culture or sub-culture the researcher is familiar with or identifies with relies heavily on the researcher's capacity for acting as a ‘professional stranger’, and there have not been too many insider ethnographic accounts of policymaking and policymakers. It might be said that there is a fundamental incompatibility between ethnographic inquiry and the knowledge claims of states and their bureaucracies: ‘It is a kind of cosmopolitan claim: to stand above the specifics of one's institution and social context. Ethnography erodes that claim’ (Kuus, 2013, p 54). Acting as a ‘professional stranger’ (Agar, 1996) is not only difficult for the researcher, but is also challenging to the researcher's informants. However, this perhaps underestimates how well ‘we’ (modern Western policymakers) know ourselves, how much we are actually strangers to ourselves in many ways, and how willing people are to explore this.