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Emotions are involved in virtually every aspect of human cognition, including information processing and decision-making. Thus, to understand political conflict and policy decision-making more fully, we must strive to understand the role of emotions in these phenomena. This paper explores expressed emotions in protests related to the policy decisions around the COVID-19 pandemic. We collect and analyze data on expressed emotions from protests in four U.S. states covered in 185 articles from 66 newspapers. We use an integrated method analysis that incorporates elements of Discourse Network Analysis (DNA) and interpretive analysis of emotions. Our DNA analysis shows differing distributions of emotions across protests against government restrictions and for restrictions to protect vulnerable populations from COVID-19. From these distributions, fear emerges as one of the more prominent emotions linked to an actor's role in the process and the context. We use interpretive analysis of emotions to understand the role of fear better. This paper contributes to the literature in two ways. First, we contribute empirically to the theoretical arguments to integrate structural, cultural, and relational analyses of emotions in politics. Second, we offer a rare combination of methods to code and analyze emotions in texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across the world, public administration and policy decisions are related to diverse levels of conflict and attention. However, the degree and variance of conflict and attention remain largely unspecified. This article examines how types of energy infrastructure and characteristics of project location are associated with the distribution of conflict and attention around the energy infrastructure siting process. Our empirical focus is on gas pipelines, electricity transmission lines, solar power projects, and wind power projects across the United States in 2018. Primarily relying on regression analysis and interviews, this article finds differences in the distribution of conflict and attention intensity within and between these energy infrastructure types, with gas pipelines and wind power projects presenting relatively higher conflict and attention intensities. However, conflict and attention are skewed to low intensities across infrastructure types. Characteristics of project locations that are positively associated with high conflict and attention intensity include the proportion of Democratic voters and the level of urbanization in the places where projects are sited. In contrast, the proportion of Black or Hispanic residents is negatively associated with high conflict and attention intensity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Maintaining the quality and reliability of electricity transmission lines is central to effective energy governance. However, transmission line siting is often a contentious policy decision since permitting and constructing lines may involve private and public property, residents and communities, and localized and national concerns. Yet, policy conflict in transmission siting across cases and over time has remained largely understudied. This article derives and tests hypotheses about policy conflict in the context of transmission lines completed or constructed between 2017 and 2018 in the United States. In exploring the full population of transmission lines, we find that a majority exhibit relatively low and moderate levels of conflict and attention rather than high levels. We further examine a subset of six of these cases that represent a range of conflict and attention intensity. We describe variation in the diversity of actors and frames, advocacy coalitions, and the volume of discourse associated with transmission line siting over time. As problems related to energy governance have become more complex, energy siting disputes are likely to remain a fruitful area for research on policy conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]