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Framing policy designs through contradictory emotions: The case of Czech single mothers

In public policy scholarship on policy design, emotions are still treated as opposed to goals, and their presence is assumed to signal that things have gone wrong. We argue, however, that understanding how and for whom emotions matter is vital to the dynamics of policy designs because emotions are central to the capacity building of policy intermediaries and, with that, to the success of public policies. We examine the case of Czech single mothers in their role as intermediaries in ‘alimony policy’. Our interpretive survey provided single mothers an opportunity to express the way they experience the policy emotionally. The analysis reveals that the policy goal of the child’s well-being is produced at the cost of the mother’s emotional tensions and that policy designs defuse these emotional tensions, implicitly. These contradictory emotions expressed by mothers show us a gateway to problematising policy designs in a novel way, which reconsiders construing policy design as a technical, solution-oriented enterprise to one in which emotional tensions intervene in policy design and are essential for succeeding.