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Flaws: Shark Bites and Emotional Public Policymaking

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Abstract

This book examines the policymaking process following highly emotional events. It focuses on the politics of shark “attacks” by looking at policy responses to tragic shark bites in Florida, Australia, and South Africa. The book reviews these cases by identifying the flaws in the human-shark relationship, including the way sharks are portrayed as the enemy, the way shark bites are seen as intentional, and how policy responses appear to be based on public safety. Flaws identifies politicians as the true sharks of this story for their manipulation of tragic circumstances to protect their own interests. It argues that shark bites are ungovernable accidents of nature, and that we are “in the way, not on the menu.” Christopher Pepin-Neff is Senior Lecturer in Public Policy at the University of Sydney, Australia. His research looks at theories of the policy process by focusing on highly emotional issues such as LGBTQI politics and the "politics of shark attacks."
Christopher L. Pepin-Neff
Flaws
Shark Bites and Emotional Public
Policymaking
Flaws
ChristopherL.Pepin-Neff
Flaws
Shark Bites and Emotional Public Policymaking
ISBN 978-3-030-10975-2 ISBN 978-3-030-10976-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10976-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018968291
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ChristopherL.Pepin-Neff
University of Sydney
Sydney, NSW, Australia
For my mom, Barbara Jean Pepin-Neff
vii
The “politics of shark attacks” takes many forms. One of the more inter-
esting connections is that of Presidents and sharks. Presidents and sharks
have a history from the start of the nation. Major George Washington
noted in his daily journal in Barbados in 1751–1752 that sharks were
caught by the sailors. And once President, he wrote to American colonial
artist John Singleton Copley, who in 1772 had painted Watson and the
Shark, depicting a shark bite in Havana Harbor in 1749. The painting
hangs today in the National Gallery of Art. President Nixon’s relationship
with sharks was less admiring. In 1969, Nixon had the White House install
preventative shark nets around the private beach at his residence near Key
Biscayne, Florida.
There is also a political component to sharks because facing them has
become a symbol of presidential character. Colonel Theodore Roosevelt
swam across Santiago Bay lled with sharks during the Spanish-American
War. This was part of the lore of the “Rough Riders” that helped him rise
to be President McKinley’s Vice President. And the John F. Kennedy
Library has noted that following the downing of PT-109, “Kennedy swam
for hours over sharp corals in shark-infested waters.” Yet shark catching
was also a sign of strength. Herbert Hoover stated, “There are only two
occasions when Americans respect privacy, especially in Presidents. Those
are prayer and shing.” Franklin Roosevelt displayed this character as a
naval ofcer deep-sea shing off Costa Rica, where he once spent 90min-
utes to ght and kill a 235-pound shark. The opposite is also true: while
facing sharks shows courage, “jumping the shark” demonstrates weakness.
In January 2016, Texas Senator Ted Cruz responded to presidential
Preface
viii PREFACE
candidate Donald Trump’s remarks regarding his birth in Canada by
tweeting out a clip of Fonzie jumping the shark on Happy Days.
Lastly, dealing with shark bites can also be an election issue. In July
1916, following four fatal shark bites in two weeks in New Jersey, President
Wilson addressed this issue in his War Cabinet and the Coast Guard was
dispatched to check on beaches. Political scientists Christopher Achen and
Larry Bartels have analyzed the differences between the 1912 and 1916
electorates and argue that the “shark attacks during the summer of 1916
reduced Wilson’s vote in the beach communities.” As recently as 2018,
presidential hopeful and NewYork Governor Andrew Cuomo responded
to shark bites off the coast of New York, stating, “I have deployed
Department of Environmental Conservation Commissioner Basil Seggos
to lead a multi-agency investigation into the apparent juvenile shark attacks
off of Fire Island.”
Indeed, Presidents and their staff have helped shape our understanding
of sharks. During the 1950s, television programs and short lms were
used to educate the public about sharks. One of the most well-known was
a lm on shark hunting featuring Howard Hill, narrated by a young
Ronald Reagan. Reagan noted that sharks were “the most deadly creature
of the deep. Forever hungry and tireless in his ceaseless search for prey.”
This is a picture of sharks that gained traction and got worse when Peter
Benchley, the 27-year-old speechwriter for President Lyndon Johnson,
left the White House to write the best seller Jaws.
So what does this mean for current presidential politics? Well, the last
record for shark bites was set in the presidential election year of 2000, so
it could be interesting, particularly in Florida. What we do know is that
increases in shark bites are linked with population trends, so more domes-
tic tourists and beachgoers in Florida in 2020 could be linked with lower
gas prices, shakiness (or rather sharkiness) in the economy, and increased
shark bites. This would make shark bites an early indicator of public
unhappiness more than shark aggression. It is too soon to know if there is
any electoral meaning to shark bite data, but the history and political uses
of these sh as a symbol for presidential politics continue to encircle us.
Sydney, NSW, Australia ChristopherL.Pepin-Neff
ix
For any book, there are always many people to thank. For a rst book, I
feel like this is especially true. To begin, I would rst like to thank my
mother, to whom this book is dedicated and who inspired me to do my
PhD, which is the basis for much of this book. I would also like to offer a
special thanks to Professor Rodney Smith, who was my PhD Supervisor
and saw me through many of the key concepts outlined here. Thanks as
well to my shark research colleagues Dr. Bob Hueter, Dr. David Shiffman,
Dr. Alison Kock, and Sonja Fordham for their support and friendship. I
would also like to thank my colleagues in the Department of Government
and International Relations at the University of Sydney, including Dr.
Thomas Wynter, Professor David Schlosberg, Professor Colin Wight,
Professor Graeme Gill, Professor Duncan Ivison, Associate Professor
Anika Gauja, Professor Ariadne Vromen, Dr. Peter Chen, Dr. Gil Merom,
Dr. Stewart Jackson, Luke O’Neill, Kirsten Andrews, and Paige Burton. I
would also like to thank the Sea Life Trust, Save Our Seas Foundation,
and Claudette Recktorik and Michael Scholl for supporting my research
over the years. In addition, much of my editing success is owed to the
pleasant environment at the Onyx Tonics café and their staff in Burlington,
Vermont. Lastly, I would like to thank my friends Kristin Caporale,
Alexander Sexton, James Cox, Luke Edgell, Dr. Senthorun Raj, and Joe
Tom Easley.
acknowledgments
xi
1 Introduction 1
2 The Rise of Shark “Attack” Discourse 13
3 Governing Emotion: How to Analyze Emotional Political
Situations 39
4 A Political Frenzy During Florida’s Summer of the Shark 63
5 Bureaucratic Success and Cape Town’s Shark Spotters
Program 91
6 The Rogue Minister and Sydney’s Adoption of Aerial
Patrols 119
7 Reviewing a Framework for Emotions and Public Policy 149
8 Considering Sharks from a Post-Jaws Perspective 163
Index 189
contents
xiii
Cape Town City of Cape Town
CPT Cape Town
FL Florida
FWC Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission
NSW New South Wales
South Africa Republic of South Africa
US United States
abbreviations
xv
Chart 2.1 Ratio of “attack” wording to the total number of words
per article 16
Chart 2.2 Attack references per article 16
Chart 2.3 Attack references in headlines 17
Fig. 3.1 Proposed model of emotion-to-policy threshold levels 52
Chart 4.1 Distribution of shark bites in Florida between 1 January
and 6 September 2001 68
Ch arts 4.2
and 4.3
Comparing HELP elements for Thadeus Kuninski’s
shark bite in 2000 and Jessie Arbogast’s shark bite in
2001 71
Ch arts 4.4
and 4.5
Comparing HELP elements for shark bites at New
Smyrna Beach in April 2001 and August 2001 72
Chart 4.6 Distribution of monthly media stories on “shark
attacks” in North America in 2001 78
Chart 4.7 Distribution of media outlets with “shark attack” media
stories in 2001in the US 79
Picture 5.1 Shark spotter on the cliffs above Fish Hoek beach.
(Photo courtesy of Alison Kock and Shark Spotters) 92
Chart 5.1 Cumulative shark bites and fatalities in Cape Town
(2003–2005) 95
Ch arts 5.2, 5.3,
and 5.4
Comparing HELP elements for three shark bite
fatalities: David Bornman in 2003, Tyna Webb in 2004,
and Henri Murray in 2005 98
Chart 5.5 Comparison of shark bite media stories in Factiva and
Cape Argus 104
list of figures
xvi LIST OF FIGURES
Chart 6.1 Comparing reported Bondi beach attendance in 2009
and 2010 127
Ch arts 6.2, 6.3,
and 6.4
Comparing HELP elements for three shark bite
incidents: Paul de Gelder, Glen Orgias and Andrew
Lindop 128
Chart 6.5 Reviewing international and domestic media reports for
the three Sydney shark bite incidents in 2009 130
Chart 6.6 Comparing media reports following shark bite incidents
in February, March, and November 2009 131
Chart 6.7 Media reports on aerial patrols and the SharkSmart
campaign 139
Chart 7.1 Incorporating multiple issues into the (negative)
emotion-policy threshold categories 159
Chart 8.1 Media reporting on Mick Fanning encounter 181
xvii
Table 1.1 Summary of leading responses to shark bite incidents 8
Table 3.1 Evaluating the speed of policy responses from the last shark
biteincident 48
Table 4.1 Measuring the speed of political attention to shark bites 70
Table 5.1 Reviewing the speed of political attention to Cape Town shark
bites 99
Table 5.2 HELP policy entrepreneur matrix 99
Table 6.1 Summary of Muter etal.’s (2013) content analysis of Australian
and US shark bite media reports between 2000 and 2010 132
Table 6.2 Summary of Neff and Hueter’s (2013) review of the NSW
government’s shark “attack” reporting 132
Table 6.3 Reviewing the speed of political attention to Sydney shark bites 133
Table 6.4 HELP policy entrepreneurship matrix 140
Table 7.1 HELP policy entrepreneurship matrix 153
Table 7.2 Reviewing the speed of political attention in Florida, Cape
Town, and NSW 154
Table 8.1 Summary of shark bite victim activities (ISAF 2009) 167
Table 8.2 Comparing boating fatalities, drowning, and canoe and kayak
fatalities with annual and worldwide shark bite fatalities 168
Table 8.3 Beach location honorable mentions 175
Table 8.4 Beach locations of concern 175
Table 8.5 Beach locations with average responses 178
list of tables
1© The Author(s) 2019
C. L. Pepin-Neff, Flaws,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10976-9_1
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Stop. If you are looking for a book that sensationalizes human-shark inter-
actions and human tragedies, you should pick up a different book. This is
not that kind of book and these are not those types of sharks. Flaws: Shark
Bites and Emotional Public Policymaking is a book that identies the aws
in people’s perceptions of sharks, what I refer to as our Jaws-related think-
ing. And it seeks to reimagine the human-shark relationship without the
social construction of Hollywood and cable news. It also pushes the
boundaries of how we think about politics and emotions. This book is
more broadly emblematic of the way governments often respond to highly
emotional events. Shark bites are an example of this type and class of polit-
ical issue.
In this case, I am asking: what is it about shark “attacks” that creates
such a social and political frenzy? It has been argued (including by me)
that shark bites are what Cass Sunstein calls low-probability, high-
consequence (LP-HC) events. But as I think about this more and more, I
question what is the high consequence? Is it the shark bite on the victim,
the hit to tourism, the media sensation, the anger of beach communities,
or the sensational and hourly media reports? What is the high conse-
quence? In this book, I argue that the way emotional events distribute
acute penalties to politicians is the high consequence of shark bites, and
that it is this phenomenon of penalty-educing political environments that
has escaped a proper examination. The issue is not that victim’s injuries
and community concern do not matter, not at all. The issue is how they
2
are made to matter and under what circumstances do they matter to poli-
tics. There is an emotional hierarchy to certain issues, at certain times,
affecting certain people, and shark bites let us illustrate this in a profound
way.
Next, I would like to preface my book in two important ways:
First, by noting that shark bites and indeed all human-shark interactions
can be very serious. So I want to stress that people are not numbers to
me. I do not for a moment make light of the injuries people endure,
fatalities that families face, or the impact these events have on the com-
munity. Again, people are not data and I am not questioning what
someone involved in these incidents wants to call it. I analyze reporting
of incidents by media outlets and politicians to review the way these ter-
rible events can be made worse by newspapers that play to sensational-
ism and by elected ofcials who fear-monger.
Secondly, I would like to ask your permission to introduce several caveats
to my introduction to this book:
1. Sharks do bite people
2. Governments are in a difcult position
3. Shark scientists are good people trying to prevent shark bites
4. We know nearly nothing about the ocean or any of the sh—speci-
cally sharks
5. There are some things that we do which may or may not be respon-
sible for stopping sharks from biting people—but our data is
limited
6. I am a troubler of assumptions. I am a political scientist—who has
adopted a mystery writer’s skepticism
With these things in mind, I must confess to be a troubler who is trou-
bled by where we are on the topic of human-shark interactions and gov-
ernment responses. What my research has found after more than tenyears
of study is not that these incidents are not tragedies—nor that they don’t
concern certain sections of the public—but that, as a matter of objective
evidence-based analysis, what we are seeing is not a shark “attack” response
but a theatrical political process, whereby an isolated and individual human
tragedy is made worse when these incidents are politicized by politicians
and sensationalized by the media.
C. L. PEPIN-NEFF
3
There are two drivers at work here for politicians and the media: politi-
cal survival and economic prot. The media should largely be ashamed of
itself for its blatant click-baiting, fear-mongering, and scapegoating of
sharks for swimming in the water. They have largely perpetuated false
myths about shark behavior to sell papers and boost its audience—like the
infamous rogue shark theory, which provides cover to politicians who use
these stories to make problems where there aren’t any and solutions which
do not work. Moreover, politicians should be ashamed for undermining
condence in the political system by lying to the public, in effect trying to
scam the public when these tragic events occur. There are only so many
times a politician can lie to the people or provide a false sense of security
before it erodes the democratic process and shark bite responses are an
example of this.
In this book, I examine the policymaking processes by starting with a
central feature of the issue: the fear of being bitten by a shark. Understanding
the inuence of policy responses in these cases provides a valuable study
because public policy is often made on the basis of averting dreaded out-
comes for politicians and certain advantaged segments of society. Public
feelings and attention about an issue, event, or stimulus can create pres-
sures that inuence the political survival of actors. As a result, understand-
ing the politics of shark “attacks” is about the way actors use the policy
process to escape difcult situations for themselves.
This book encompasses a number of important theoretical themes,
including the role of emotions in decision-making, the actions of policy
entrepreneurs to champion policies, the narratives that are used, and the
different types of policy windows. Together, these themes and theoretical
elements illustrate how the issue is not simply the way shark bites serve as
dreaded outcomes, but rather what the emergence of feelings about spe-
cic, real or perceived, dreaded outcomes does to the political system dur-
ing certain contextual periods. I therefore begin with the role of
emotion—in this case negative emotion, because policy responses are
often inuenced by the feelings about the idea of a given outcome rather
than the reality of its occurrence. It is here that this book focuses by look-
ing at the way the psychological and emotional dimensions of dreaded
outcomes inuence the policy process and what other contextual factors
accelerate or mitigate social and political attention. This book is novel in
its development of a framework for analyzing the role of political emotion-
ality in policymaking. I propose a framework (called HELP: high emotion-
low policy) for understanding these elements and this is a key contribution
INTRODUCTION
4
of this book. To review this, I examine shark bite cases that will allow for
a broader review of the way emotion and dreaded outcomes are managed
within the political system.
The research questions that motivate me in writing this book are as fol-
lows: why sharks and not dolphins? Why one shark bite, but not another?
And why do responses differ to the seemingly same kinds of situations?
Flaws: Shark Bites and Emotional Public Policymaking approaches these
questions with an important bias that there are fundamental aws in pub-
lic perceptions and policymaking related to human-shark interactions, par-
ticularly following shark bites. Some of these aws include public
perceptions about the likely risk of a shark bite (known as probability
neglect), or the presumption that communities are upset and blame sharks
for shark bites. The aws reviewed in this book include the depiction of
sharks as the enemy, the idea that sharks intentionally “attack,” and the
assumption that policy responses are designed to provide beach safety.
Instead, this book advances the argument that the politics of shark
“attacks” involves the way politicians use the emotionality of the situation
following a shark bite to control the policy process and protect themselves.
They do this in three ways:
First, the discourse they use includes emotive phrases like “shark
attack” that convey a very serious or fatal human-shark interaction,
regardless of the details. This plays into a awed thinking that all
shark “attacks” are the same. In addition, this language is important
because the public has a social-emotional threshold for the number
of “shark attacks” it will tolerate along its beaches. Therefore, the
language serves as the basis for required government action.
Secondly, political actors give meaning to shark bites by relying on
sensationalized media reports and ctional stories from movies like
Jaws. The result is a awed government narrative that treats sharks
like movie monsters and “rogue” menaces intentionally eating bath-
ers. These tales have political implications because they make ungov-
ernable accidents of nature governable by identifying individual
sharks as responsible. Narratives about intent-driven sharks can also
boost fear (Pepin-Neff and Wynter 2018) and increase policy prefer-
ences for lethal responses.
And thirdly, political actors often select policy responses that are
designed to relieve perceived social anxiety and boost public con-
dence in the government, which often do little to protect the public
C. L. PEPIN-NEFF
5
or address the underlying risk. The aw here is to assume the policy
response is directed at beach safety to reduce the occurrence of
future shark bites. Different responses include shark hunts, shark
culls, aerial patrols, watchtowers, electronic deterrents, and bans
related to shark tourism. Shining a light on these responses is impor-
tant because they can be harmful by misleading the public, killing
protected shark populations, and offering a false sense of security.
This is the rst book dedicated to examining the policymaking follow-
ing shark bites. In highlighting these issues, however, this book goes
beyond the cases and the issue of shark bite prevention; rather, I suggest
that these events illustrate a class of highly emotional issues that often
result in policies meant to placate the public and protect politicians. Using
shark bite incidents as the case studies, this book demonstrates how emo-
tionality facilitates the distribution of penalties to government actors and
how these pressures inuence policy responses directed at emotional relief.
In turn, the two objectives of Flaws are (1) to identify the main arguments
used to support policy responses following shark bites and (2) to highlight
the ways emotion inuences the policy process, including politicians’ per-
ceptions of penalties, the use of emotive language, and policy responses to
provide emotional relief.
Understanding the factors that contribute to policy responses is an
important question for three reasons. First, this question addresses a theo-
retical issue because understanding why some issues produce responses
while the same issue at other points does not is a lingering question in
political science and most major social science elds. Answering even part
of this question chips away at the contexts and conditions under which
policy responses occur and aids in understanding political behavior.
Secondly, this question is valuable at a governance level because the impli-
cations of an increasing number of seemingly “knee-jerk” policy responses
impacts long-term governance. This highlights the need to examine their
impact within the policymaking process. And thirdly, this research ques-
tion operates at a practical level because shark bite policy responses can
undermine shark conservation. Thus, this is a difcult question on various
levels that can help address multiple dilemmas.
While it is unknown exactly why one policy will occur on an issue, but
not another, there appear to be certain pressures, at certain times, that
drive these responses. This can be seen outside of incrementally driven
government actions. Annual budget negotiations are different from
INTRODUCTION
6
policymaking during unexpected policy windows (points of political
change or opportunity). Jack Walker reviews the way US Senators address
problem cycles and argues that there are periods when “pressing prob-
lems” require that “[a]ction of some kind, even if it is merely symbolic,
must be taken as quickly as possible.” Other research has noted these
responses, including Lodge and Hood, who provide a valuable critique of
knee-jerk responses as “forced choice” events. The “forced choice” is
dened as “the condition of having to respond to an immediate or antici-
pated crisis.” I refer to these periods as high emotion-low policy threshold
(HELP) periods, in which the relationship between the emotional nature
of the issue’s negative outcome can add pressure on actors to open policy
windows. This characterization is valuable because it locates emotion as a
principal driver in the policy process while also acknowledging the role of
structural and political contexts that establish policy thresholds.
Understanding seemingly knee-jerk policymaking is also a valuable ele-
ment of policy analysis because this type of short-term issue governance is
on the rise. Governing in the 24-hour news cycle is often about gover-
nance in constant motion, to stay ahead of the next volatile issue or per-
ceived crisis. However, the speed of government may not be conducive to
the public’s expected time frame for policymaking, and as a result, the
speed of politics wins out. For example, former Australian MP John
Hewson has noted that “short-term politics is dominating the process,” in
which the goal of politicians is to “score points” within the media cycle
(personal communication 5 June 2013). Linking the question of why pol-
icy responses occur and which pressures create environments for knee-jerk
policies is the issue of emotion.
Feelings of dread from a perceived shark “attack” outcome are an inu-
ential force in political decision-making following a shark bite and many
other events or issues; however, this role of emotion is underexplored in
the policy process. The role of emotion is often relegated to emotionally
reective reactions and overreactions, with the implication that little
thought went into what is essentially an autonomic, in this case political,
response. Simply hit a certain sensitive emotional point and governments
will kick. Strike a raw nerve and a reaction or overreaction will be pro-
duced. This book challenges the assumed nature of these presumptions
and seeks to identify a framework that begins to locate the role of emotion
in the policy process.
Determining the contexts in which emotion plays a role is important
for policy analysis because highly emotional events do not always lead to
C. L. PEPIN-NEFF
7
an increased likelihood of a policy response. In keeping with this, I argue
that knee-jerk responses are not simple causal effects from emotional situ-
ations. Locating emotion as a feature of the process helps explain the
instinctual and cultural dimensions that give preference to certain issues
for political attention and why certain responses are advantaged or resisted.
In addition, placing emotion within the policy cycle (issue emergence,
agenda setting, policy solutions, implementation, and evaluation) helps
identify the emotional manipulation of the public by actors, in the timing
and selection of solutions. Indeed, references to emotion in public policy
are often found in the more developed literature on crises, low-probability
disasters, focusing events, and moral panics.
The ways in which people and actors feel about a threat or toward a
solution are key elements that should be systematically incorporated into
policy analysis. Locating emotion within the process also adds to this
explicability. The literature has noted that under stress, the public may be
seen as more vulnerable. Leith and Baumeister (1996) argue that people
have a limited capacity to “think things through” when they get angry or
upset, and as a result look for the best outcome. Lazarus argues that under
anxiety, people do not know what to do or how to respond. Indeed, past
schemas can trigger anger from representative events.
The next step is to look at the differences following shark bites in the
case studies outlined in this book. In the American state of Florida, the
Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) voted to
enact a statutory statewide ban on eco-tourism shark feeding in 2001. In
the South African City of Cape Town, the City Council adopted an inno-
vative Shark Spotters program through funding in 2004. And in the
Australian state of New South Wales (NSW), the Department of Primary
Industries adopted aerial patrols along its beaches in a funding scheme in
2009.
Table 1.1 highlights policy responses to shark bites around the world.
It illustrates an increase in lethal responses to shark bites across the globe.
Historically, both lethal and non-lethal responses have been implemented
around the world over the past 100years. I note that while 75% of beach
locations (31 of 41) that have experienced shark bite incidents do not
allow the killing of sharks as part of their beach safety program, of the 10
beach locations that do allow killing sharks, 70% (7 of 10) began doing so
since 2004.
While there are a variety of policy responses, a common feature of these
issues is their highly emotional nature—more specically, the negative
INTRODUCTION
8
emotions people feel related to their perceptions about the dreaded con-
sequences from shark bites. As a result, I rely on the risk literature regard-
ing the importance of emotions in preference shaping. This is distinct
from other discussions of mood used in political science.
This book has had two main limitations. First, it is limited to the three
case studies, based on time and available resources. Additional case studies
and quantitative analysis, both of which were beyond the limits of this
book, would be useful future tests of the framework presented. Second, it
is important to note that within these cases, other causal relationships that
are not noted may be contributing factors. This analysis attempts to apply
Table 1.1 Summary of leading responses to shark bite incidents
Shark bite
prevention
method
Year
enacted
First
nation/state
to develop
the method
Current locations using the method Current #
of countries
using the
method
Shark hunts 1916 US/NJ Egypt (2010), Mexico (2010),
Seychelles (2011), Reunion Island
(2011), Russia (2011), Western
Australia (2000/2011)
6
Beach nets 1937 Australia/
NSW
New South Wales (1937),
Queensland (1962), KZN Natal
(1958), Thailand (2012)
4
Drumlines/
longlines
near beaches
1959 US/HA Brazil (2004), Queensland (1962),
KZN Natal (1958)
1
Beach
enclosures
1907 South
Africa/
Durban
Croatia (1920), Hong Kong (1993),
New South Wales (1937)a
1
Shark
Spotters
2004 South
Africa/
Cape Town
Cape Town (2004) 1
Human
behavior
responses:
Beach
closings
Warning
signs
Flags
Aerial
patrol
1837
(ban on
swim)
Australia/
NSW
California, Florida, Hawaii, Texas,
North Carolina, South Carolina,
Alabama, Georgia, Oregon,
Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware,
Tasmania, Bahamas, the Philippines,
Ecuador, UK, Costa Rica, Fiji, Papua
New Guinea, New Caledonia,
Solomon Islands, Marshall Islands,
South Korea, New Zealand, South
Australia, Italy
28
1934
(ags)
Australia/
NSW
1930
(aerial
patrol)
Australia/
NSW
C. L. PEPIN-NEFF
9
an original framework to policy analysis. As a result, demonstrating the
applicability and promise of the theory was a key objective. This book
contains eight chapters, which are outlined and annotated below.
Chapter 1: IntroduCtIon
This chapter is what you are reading right now and introduces the outline
and main theories behind this book. This includes the tone of this book
(which is quite critical), recaps of the chapters (of which there are eight),
and key arguments (the aws in the human-shark relationship). The aws
include the way “shark attack” language is used, the way Jaws-related
thinking creates an impression of intentionality in shark bite incidents, and
the way policy responses are seen to protect the public. This chapter high-
lights that responses to shark bites can make situations worse by offering a
false sense of security while their chief goal is to protect politicians.
Chapter 2: therIse ofshark “attaCk” dIsCourse
This chapter examines the history and social construction of shark of
“attacks” from a social-political point of view. In this chapter, I highlight
how shark “attack” was an invented term that replaced “shark bite” and
“shark accident” in the academic and media lexicon because of a con-
certed effort by researchers in the US and Australia in the 1930s to change
the wording. This change was based on a fundamentally different view of
shark behavior that believed they were intent on biting humans. There is
no scientic evidence to support the idea that humans are prey for sharks,
yet the shark “attack” labeling has stood even as our understanding of
shark behavior has changed. Moreover, shark “attack” language has been
the only way to talk about human-shark interactions. A 2013 study by
myself and Dr. Bob Hueter has shown that 38% of reported shark “attacks”
in Sydney’s state of NSW had no injury at all. So shark “attack” was
invented to inuence an understanding of shark behavior that no longer is
accepted by science, and the phrase is being used to describe events with
no injury. In addition, shark “attack” was made more graphic through the
lm Jaws, which presented the idea of shark attack as a fatal event. As a
result, shark “attack” has been solidied in the social consciousness with a
vivid fatal outcome. I conclude this chapter by noting new labels that have
been developed by Hueter and myself to discuss human-shark interac-
tions, including shark sighting, shark encounter, shark bite, and fatal shark
INTRODUCTION
10
bite. In summary, this chapter challenges the continued use of shark
“attack” language, pushes back on sensational media reporting, and
informs public perceptions regarding human-shark encounters.
Chapter 3: GovernInG emotIon: how toanalyze
emotIonal polItICal sItuatIons
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 media attention. I suggest that political actors responded to
these situations by addressing the political penalty, which usually involved
redistributing public emotionality.
Chapter 4: apolItICal frenzy durInGflorIdas
summer oftheshark
This chapter examines the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation
Commission’s enactment of a ban on shark feeding in Florida in 2001
during the “Summer of the Shark.” The policy called for a ban on eco-
tourism dives that included feeding sharks below the surface in Florida
state waters so that divers could view them. The considerations of the
Commission took place over 18 months (in which there was one fatal
shark bite), but the discussions continued with an anticipated result for
greater regulations with continued practice. However, a spate of shark 21
non-fatal bites during the summer, including 6 shark bites in one beach on
one day, drew great media attention and put political pressure on the then
Governor, Jeb Bush. As a result of the penalties posed by this environ-
ment, Governor Bush acted to protect himself by serving as a policy entre-
preneur and cuing members of the Commission to enact the ban despite
the fact that there had never been a shark bite during a shark feeding
excursion in Florida. However, an argument was made that shark feeding
could make sharks gain a taste for humans. In summary, I challenge the
effectiveness and need for the ban on shark feeding as anything more than
a quick x to an emotional period aimed at protecting Governor Bush’s
re-election interests.
C. L. PEPIN-NEFF
11
Chapter 5: BureauCratIC suCCess andCape towns
shark spotters proGram
This chapter will investigate the adoption of the Shark Spotters program
by the city of Cape Town in 2005. The Shark Spotters program was an
operation that placed trained staff on the surrounding hills of certain
beaches such as Fish Hoek and Muizenberg to keep a lookout for sharks
and sound an alarm alerting bathers. This followed a series of shark bites
in 2003 and 2004, including the fatal consumption of a 77-year-old
grandmother that served as the catalyst for the policy window. This case is
different than others because bureaucrats and scientists managed it,
though they still needed to address the emotional toll a series of shark
bites took on the community. As a result, they focused on interrupting the
number of fatalities at particular locations. Standout issues in this chapter
include the salience-prone nature of tabloid reporting in Cape Town and
the pushback against sensationalized narratives. In summary, Cape Town
stands out as a policy response that provided real safety and did reduce the
risk of a shark bite.
Chapter 6: theroGue mInIster andsydneys
adoptIon ofaerIal patrols
This chapter reviews the New South Wales government’s adoption of aer-
ial patrols as the third case study. I investigate a change in policy made by
then Minister for Primary Industries, Ian Macdonald, to fund the reintro-
duction of airplane and helicopter patrols at local Sydney beaches follow-
ing a series of high-prole shark bite incidents, including one at Bondi
beach and in Sydney Harbour. The Minister’s decision was made despite
research that has shown that helicopter aerial patrols have a 12–15% suc-
cess rate in spotting sharks, which is higher than airplanes (Robbins etal.
2014). I suggest that Minister Macdonald located himself in the solution-
making process as the policy entrepreneur to save himself politically.
Through a narrative of public fear, the policy was adopted. In summary,
this chapter highlights how the adoption of aerial patrols was a political
response aimed at increasing the Minister’s political position rather than a
public safety measure.
INTRODUCTION
12
Chapter 7: revIewInG aframework foremotIons
andpuBlIC polICy
This chapter provides a summary of the major arguments and draws out
the specic contributions the book has made. In particular, it looks at the
role of emotion, salience, and policy entrepreneurship in the three case
studies. It demonstrates how each of these elements plays a role and how
each case is based on the distribution of political penalties and dreaded
outcomes. In this chapter, I expand beyond shark bites and note how the
framework presented can be used to analyze other types of highly emo-
tional events and issues. In addition, the full (four-category) proposition
of an emotion-policy framework is noted along with the implications for
policy analysis.
Chapter 8: ConsIderInG sharks from
apost-Jaws perspeCtIve
This chapter concludes Flaws by doing three things. First, it reviews the
aws being analyzed, which include the way sharks are portrayed as the
enemy, the way shark bites are seen as intentional, and how policy responses
may appear to be based on public safety. It identies politicians as the true
sharks of this story for their manipulation of tragic circumstances to protect
their own interests. Secondly, this chapter also provides a report card on
other policy responses around the world and suggests that the “save the
sharks” movement is building. And nally, it concludes with nal thoughts
about the human-shark relationship and how different it can be in the future
without Hollywood and cable news. This is a world where sharks are just
sh, shark bites are ungovernable accidents of nature, and policy responses
tell the truth to the public, that we are “in the way, not on the menu.”
referenCes
Leith, K.P., & Baumeister, R.F. (1996). Why do bad moods increase self- defeating
behavior? Emotion, risk tasking, and self-regulation. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 71(6), 1250.
Pepin-Neff, C.L., & Wynter, T. (2018). Reducing fear to inuence policy prefer-
ences: An experiment with sharks and beach safety policy options. Marine
Policy, 88, 222–229.
Robbins, W.D., etal. (2014). Experimental evaluation of shark detection rates by
aerial observers. Ed. Markus Lappe. PLoS ONE, 9(2), e83456. PMC.Web. 15
October 2018.
C. L. PEPIN-NEFF
13© The Author(s) 2019
C. L. Pepin-Neff, Flaws,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10976-9_2
CHAPTER 2
The Rise ofShark “Attack” Discourse
IntroductIon
The word “shark attack” conveys enough emotion and alarm to empty a
beach. And the phrase “shark attack” conveys a one-dimensional narrative
of death and horror. Indeed, even the word “shark,” particularly in a water
setting, ignites public emotion, much like “re” in a packed theater (Neff
2012). In addition to arousing emotion, Webster (1962, 45) notes that the
word “shark” conveys particular imagery; it “immediately conjures a man-
eater, rather than a dogsh, angelsh, thresher or other harmless species.”
The link between the cultural construction of these phrases and instinctual
fear of their occurrence and outcomes dates back more than 2500years.
In this chapter, my goal is to locate the presence of emotional elements
within the shark bite case studies of Florida, Cape Town, and Sydney. I
argue that emotion can be viewed in policy analysis in two ways: (1) as an
instinctual driver, in which primal emotions trigger survival behavior; and
(2) as a cultural magnet that informs constructions, social biases, and
worldviews.
Engagement on emotion requires a review of a number of fundamental
questions. First, what is emotion? Second, how are emotions measured?
And third, why are the measurements for emotions used in this research
valid? Kennedy-Moore and Watson (1999, 4) state that emotions are
quick and explicit evaluations of a situation. Emotions have high degrees
of strength and are temporary in nature (Frijda 1993). Plutchik (1980)
divides emotions into eight primary kinds, which include fear, anger, joy,
14
sadness, acceptance, disgust, anticipation, and surprise, as well as discreet
emotions, which are combinations of primary emotions. The evolutionary
perspective on emotions is put forward by Plutchik and shared by Kennedy-
Moore and Watson (1999), who argue that emotions serve three pur-
poses: adaption and survival, regulation, and communication.
There are two chief indicators from language that assist in measuring
emotion: the degree to which words are pleasant (or unpleasant) and
whether they arouse (or activate) the reader (Sigelman and Whissell 2002;
Russell etal. 1989). Davis afrms that the roles of pleasantness and arousal
are appropriate measures in discourse analysis based on neuroscience and
psychology literature. He argues that emotions come from “the interac-
tion of a valence (pleasant/unpleasant) dimension and a nervous system
arousal or activation dimension” (Davis 2011, 321).
Shark bite incidents cue high emotion responses. In particular, use of
the phrase “shark attack” is identied as a key variable in connecting sharks
and shark bites to prioritized emotional responses based on the fear of a
particularly dreaded outcome. Policy reactions are enacted to avert these
outcomes and displace social anxiety. This approach does not exclude
other theories (Lavender and Hommel 2007; Huelsman et al. 2003);
however, it is consistent with Zajonc (1980), Slovic (2004), and Damasio
(1996).
Emotion should be added to the “arsenal” of political science research
and integrated into policy design models because it provides a fundamen-
tal element in greater understanding of why policy change occurs. Solomon
(1998, 5) argues that emotions are “in themselves strategic and political.”
Emotion connects with threat avoidance at a place that demonstrates an
important role in policy design. Lodge and Taber (2005, 456) suggest
that “all socio-political concepts are emotion laden.” The speed at which
stimuli from sounds, words, images, or events trigger emotional priorities
impacts public and political thresholds. Thus, the argument is not simply
that emotion is present, but that the presence of certain emotional cues
automatically arouses certain emotions to command behavior (Lodge and
Taber 2005). Under this analysis, locating high emotion within shark bite
incidents represents more than the belief that people nd shark bites to be
frightening; rather, it suggests that these features can prompt a rapid cas-
cade of emotional and political responses. This chapter now moves for-
ward to analyze discourse in the three case studies, historical trends, and
policy responses to measure emotion around shark bites.
C. L. PEPIN-NEFF
15
HIgH EmotIon mEasurEmEnts InnEwspapEr cHaptErs
FollowIngsHark BItEs InFlorIda (2001), capE town
(2004), andsydnEy (2009)
The choice of wording in the new media during and following events is
critical. Word usage elicits emotions, paints a picture, and allocates blame.
Reporting on shark bites from media and public institutions sets the stage
for personal and collective considerations. As Edelman (1998, 131) notes,
“[T]he language used to discuss public issues and public ofcials acquires
its distinctive function from the fears and the hopes it arouses in us.”
A content analysis was conducted to measure the frequency of the term
“attack” in each of the case studies. I reviewed use of the term in three
ways: (i) the number of mentions in proportion to average word count of
the articles, (ii) percentage of articles with “attack” in the headline, and
(iii) the number of mentions in the main text. This analysis was attentive
to the qualitative use of “attack” in examining each article. For example,
there were instances in which “attacks” on other marine life were men-
tioned in articles or where the International Shark Attack File or Australian
Shark Attack File is noted. These references were excluded from this
analysis.
The newspaper accounts following shark bites in Florida (2001), Cape
Town (2003–2004), and Sydney (2009) provide useful data for analyzing
affect. Articles were selected starting on the rst day of the month, when
the shark bites began, until the last day of the month, when the policy
change occurred. News outlets were determined based on statewide cov-
erage. The Associated Press was selected for Florida; the South African Press
Association, African News Wire Service, and Cape Argus were used in Cape
Town; and the Sydney Morning Herald, Daily Telegraph, and The
Australian were chosen in Sydney. The key word “shark attack” was used
in Factiva to gather the widest number of articles during these periods.
Articles were ltered for each location, which provided 25 articles from
Sydney, 22 from Cape Town, and 49 from Florida. There are more articles
from Florida because reporting by the Associated Press included a greater
number of follow-up articles regarding one case in particular, the shark
bite incident on the then-eight-year-old Jessie Arbogast.
The results show that each location used “attack” in a signicant man-
ner. The longest articles were in the news media in Sydney, with an average
length of 625 words, Florida was second with an average of 493 words,
and Cape Town was the shortest at 414 words. However, newspaper
THE RISE OFSHARK “ATTACK” DISCOURSE
16
articles in Cape Town referenced the phrase “attack” at the highest rate
when compared to the total number of words in an article. Here, “attack”
was used once every 107 words, followed by Sydney at one “attack” per
126 words, and Florida the least, with one “attack” per 158 words (shown
in Chart 2.1).
Chart 2.2 shows that Sydney news media used the phrase most often,
with an average of six times per article (144 times in 23 articles), while
Florida news reports used the term the least often, with an average of four
references per article (203 times over 49 articles). Cape Town reports
were situated in the middle, using the word “attack” an average of ve
times per article (115 times in 22 articles).
An analysis of “attack” references in headlines (Chart 2.3) paints a dif-
ferent picture from the previous results. In Florida, “attack” appears in the
headline 78 percent of the time (38 of 49), 64 percent in Cape Town (14
of 22), and only 30 percent in Sydney (7 of 23). Indeed, there appears to
be an inverse relationship for Florida and Sydney with respect to refer-
ences to “attack” in the headline and text of the articles reviewed.
In all, these results show a high frequency of high emotion shark
“attack” language during each of the case study periods.
158
107 126
0
50
100
150
200
Florida Cape Town Sydney
Chart 2.1 Ratio of
“attack” wording to the
total number of words
per article
4
5
6
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
FloridaCape Town Sydney
Chart 2.2 Attack
references per article
C. L. PEPIN-NEFF
17
A qualitative review of the language in context is important, particularly
given perceived associations between “attack” language and fatal out-
comes and the actual outcomes from shark bite incidents. There were no
fatalities in any of the Florida articles with most “attacks” in the headline,
nor were there any fatal shark bites in the Sydney reports that registered
the most frequent usage per article. In Cape Town, however, three of the
four shark bites included in reports were fatalities. Thus, emotional attack
usage appears to be independent of severity.
usE oFsHark “attack” tErmInology
Examples from the three shark bite case studies reinforce the emotional
nature of “attack” usage. Peace (2009, 12) notes that reports in Australia
“often include a chronological table of in-shore attacks over the past ve
or ten years.” Bullet points in an article in the Daily Telegraph, entitled
“Attacks by Sharks at Record Numbers– Year of Swimming Dangerously”
(Hildebrand 2009), illustrate this point. It states:
* EIGHT attacks already this year, compared to ve in 2008 according to
the Shark Research Institute;
* FIFTY-one attacks since 2000 compared to 13in the 1990s, according to
the State Government’s own data;
* ALMOST double the number of serious attacks in Australia in the ve
years to 2008 (41) compared to the ‘90s, according to the International
Shark Attack File.
These lists of “attacks” were excluded from the content analysis counts,
and reports of Sydney shark bites still showed the most usage. This
repeated use is also apparent in Florida articles by the Associated Press (AP
2001). One report on 16 July entitled “Shark Bites Panhandle Surfer Near
Site of Boy’s Attack” about a surfer who was bitten by a shark uses the
word “attack” four times in 129 words, stating:
79%
64%
34%
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
Florida Cape Town Sydney
Chart 2.3 Attack
references in headlines
THE RISE OFSHARK “ATTACK” DISCOURSE
18
The attack occurred about six miles from where young Jessie Arbogast was
attacked earlier this month. Meanwhile, an 18-year-old tourist from
Cincinnati was bitten on the foot Sunday by a 3-foot shark while riding a
boogie board off Amelia Island, about 38 miles north of Jacksonville, of-
cials said. Tim Flanigan was being treated in the emergency room Monday
morning at Shands Jacksonville hospital, an ofcial said. His condition was
not immediately available, she said. On Sunday, doctors treating Jessie said
his brain may not have been damaged from blood loss after the attack.
Jessie sometimes appears to understand what’s going on around him,
according to the medical team that reattached his arm after a 200-pound
bull shark attacked him, also taking a large bite out of his thigh. (Instances
in italics)
In addition to the dubious nature of conveying a shark bite sixmiles
away as “near” another shark bite incident, this piece conates the two
meanings of the term “attack.”
The Cape Town media also use “shark attack” labeling in their report-
ing. In a South African Press Association article (SAPA 2005) in 2005
entitled “UK Tourist Battles Shark in Dreams,” the report follows up on
a shark bite survivor and states:
Nightmarish images of a savage shark attack were disturbing his sleep,
British tourist Chris Sullivan said on Wednesday. “Every time I shut my
eyes, the thing was just coming [towards me] … In my dreams I wasn’t
winning the battle,” said Sullivan. He was speaking about Monday’s
attack at Noordhoek beach along the Cape coast, which saw him almost
lose his right leg, and his life. Speaking to the media from a wheelchair at
the Constantiaberg medi-clinic, Sullivan, 32, said he would have to face
his nightmares on the road to full recovery. He described how in his
dreams he fought the shark, reliving his ght with the shark, believed to
be a Great White, and how the vivid image of the shark was starting to
evanesce.
In all, this analysis has so far provided results that indicate that phrase
“shark attack” is a highly emotional phrase and highly prevalent in its use
in each of the three case studies through a content analysis. The next ele-
ments of this review explain why the phrase “shark attack” in particular
triggers a prioritized emotional response, and what evidence supports a
trend of emotional policy responses to displace emotions.
C. L. PEPIN-NEFF
19
prIorItIzEd InstInctual EmotIons towardsHarks
andsHark BItEs
The emotional fear of sharks and shark bites is founded on an evolutionary
survival instinct in which mortal anxiety is stimulated by (a) the nature of
the threat (i.e. the fear of being eaten) and (b) the identity of the threat
(i.e. fear of certain predators). The premise of this theory begins with
James (1884, 1894) and Lange (1885), who address ight or ght and
suggest that there is a connection between emotions and physiology.
Dunn etal. (2006) explain that James and Lange were stating that an
“emotion experience arises directly from the perception of change in the
body: when we run from a bear in the woods, we are afraid because we
run, rather than we run because we are afraid” (Dunn etal. 2006, 240).
The implications of this theory can be seen in economics, psychology,
sociology, and risk theory. As Slovic (2004, 973) notes, “[L]ong before
there was probability neglect, risk assessment, or decision analysis, there
were intuition, instinct and gut feeling to tell us whether an animal was
safe to approach or the water was safe to drink.”
Lane and Chazan (1989, 335) highlight the rst issue, being eaten, by
noting that from a “genetic point of view,” learning to eat projects upon
us fears of being consumed. The characteristics of sharks as a powerful
predator that can “attack” suddenly arouse specic fears of sharks (Lane
and Chazan 1989, 327). Papson (1992, 72) reviews documentary lms of
sharks and highlights the way lms accent the dangerousness of sharks as
creatures “from the deep.” He notes that lms refer to “the primal fear of
being attacked and eaten by something unseen” (Papson 1992, 72). Yet,
there is an important hierarchy built into our emotional memory that dis-
tinguishes between fear-relevant stimuli (such as sharks) and fear- irrelevant
stimuli (such as coconuts). The fact that falling coconuts kill an average of
150 people each year and shark bites kill 10 is separate from the selectivity
of this bias (Roach 2006). Therefore, being eaten by a coconut is not a
great fear.
The prioritization of primal or “reexive fear” against being eaten is
tied to literature regarding particular animals, such as crocodiles (Caldicott
etal. 2001), sharks (Krop and Krause 1976), and snakes (Costello 1982).
This theory is also put forward by Isaac Marks (1987, 3), who writes:
Fear is a vital evolutionary legacy that leads an organism to avoid threat and
has obvious survival value. It is an emotion produced by the perception of
THE RISE OFSHARK “ATTACK” DISCOURSE
20
present or impending danger and it is normal in appropriate situations.
Without fear few would survive long under natural conditions. Fear girds
our loins for rapid action in the face of danger and alerts us to perform well
under stress. It helps us ght the enemy, drive carefully, parachute safely,
take exams, speak well to a critical audience, keep a foothold in climbing a
mountain.
Building on the evolutionary nature of fear, Damasio (1996) argues that
basic developmental traits may be stored in our memories and may now be
stimulated by social environments to produce survival responses. Emotions
play a key role, but may not be the only type of innate response that can
inuence behavior. Damasioetal. (1991) argues that “emotion-based bias-
ing signals” (Dunn etal. 2006) are biologically produced and impact on
decision-making. These signals are “somatic markers” (Damasio et al.
1991, 1417), which he explains by noting, “the brain has long had avail-
able, in evolution, a means to select good responses rather than bad ones
in terms of survival. I suspect that the mechanism has been co-opted for
behavioural guidance outside the realm of basic survival.” As a result, social
functioning uses survival wiring in non-survival-related settings.
Ohman and Mineka’s (2001) research largely supports the propositions
of Marks (1987) and Damasio (1994). They compare conditioning stud-
ies of humans and non-human primates, monkeys. In one study, humans
are shown pictures of “fear-relevant” stimuli for snakes and “fear-
irrelevant” stimuli for butteries (Öhman and Soares 1998). Both showed
responses consistent with threats to survival based on evolutionary adap-
tion (Ohman and Mineka 2001, 515). The authors argue that fearful
emotions are a critical example of evolution in humans, and that fear
responses necessarily function automatically and independently of cogni-
tive information to avoid threats to extinction (Ohman and Mineka 2001,
483). They argue that our genes’ emotional memory responses are selec-
tive and hierarchical toward certain animals based on human exposure
over time. They argue that fear learning is passed down, and that fears, or
phobias, function as evolutionary warning signs. Because evolutionary
learning is a key component, threats that are common to past ancestors
(such as fear of snakes) are more likely to concern people than contempo-
rary dangers (e.g. car crash phobias or climate change) (Ohman and
Mineka 2001, 483).
This research reinforces the position that emotions are prioritized on
the basis of exposure to certain stimuli. Sharks, snakes, reptiles, and other
C. L. PEPIN-NEFF
21
predators are in a heightened category based on appearance and perceived
behavior. As a result, feelings toward “animals we like” are pre-wired and
can be seen in attitudes today. This “fear learning” is therefore essential to
survival (Ohman and Mineka 2001).
The way in which “fear learning” (Ohman and Mineka 2001) can be
applied to individual and collective political behavior is seen in Lodge and
Taber’s (2005) “hot cognition” proposal. They argue that there is an
“affective charge” to every symbol and political issue (Lodge and Taber
2005, 456) that is automatic based on long-term memory. Lodge and
Taber (2005) note that political issues can be primed, such as the emo-
tional response to reading headline text about George W.Bush. Feelings
about President Bush are activated and biased in this analysis in favor of
prior beliefs. The automaticity with which this happens encodes emotions
onto issues that makes reframing more difcult because people tend to
rely on their earlier impressions. If this prior attitude bias of long-term
memory supported by Lodge and Taber (2005) is applied to the evolu-
tionary memory model argued by Ohman and Mineka (2001), then it
becomes clear to see why sharks and shark bites as political issues are easily
recalled and resistant to change.
Positive or negative feelings toward animals are largely based on a spe-
cies’ size, color, location, and behavior (Stokes 2007). Animals that look
“alien,” including sharks, snakes, and reptiles, are given the lowest sup-
port. Stephen Kellert’s (1989) analysis of public perceptions toward ani-
mals showed that sharks ranked as the eighth most frightening animal to
the public. In addition, Czech, Krausman, and Borkhataria (1998, 1110)
found that animals considered “dangerous” receive more negative
attitudes.
Emotion prioritizes negativity based on real or perceived exposure to
conicts with dangerous animal behavior. Zinn etal. (1998) found that
the context of human-wildlife conicts, identity of the species, and control
measures proposed were the variables that impacted support for response
actions. Similarly, Kleivan, Bjerke, and Kaltenborn’s (2004) survey of the
public found that respondent’s proximity to the animal and the “severity
of animal behaviour” were key factors in the degree of perceived fear
(Kleivan etal. 2004, 1655–1656).
For sharks, the scenario-specic behavior of a few dangerous species has
been projected into public feelings about sharks in general. As a result, the
way incidents are dened for the public is an important factor that can
impact all shark populations. Given the connections between evolutionary
THE RISE OFSHARK “ATTACK” DISCOURSE
22
emotional memory regarding sharks and cultural narratives about humans
and sharks, these shark bites on humans have a low threshold for social
anxiety and threat aversion. Dobson (2008, 51) notes that “shark attacks”
can take on a life of their own as “shark panics.”
In particular, cultural contributions from media coverage of sharks, in
lm and in the news, reinforce frightening stereotypes about sharks. This
includes children’s movies such as Finding Nemo (2003), in which the
smell of sh blood sends a great White Shark into frenzy, and Shark Tale
(2004), where the cartoon sharks were members of the maa; and televi-
sion programs such as the BBC’s Deadly 60, where multiple shark species
are featured. In turn, public support for sharks remains low. Spruill’s
(1997, 149) survey of 900 people showed that just 30 percent of respon-
dents felt that killing sharks was a “serious problem.”
Another example of the roles of emotion related to sharks is public
responses to beach closings as a result of sharks, jellysh, or whale migra-
tions. The public has little emotional problem with these positively valued
or negative but passing situations. This is in contrast to the connotations
with “shark-infested waters.” Emotional priorities toward outrage, dis-
gust, and fear are highlighted here.
Thompson and Mintzes (2002) build on Kellert’s work by analyzing
the connection between knowledge of sharks and attitudes. Indeed, they
connect the negative public perceptions of sharks with declining shark
population numbers (Thompson and Mintzes 2002, 647), and their data
show increases in supportive attitudes with education. Emotions do not
exist in a vacuum, however, and the use of education to balance one high
emotion with another provides one avenue for addressing these issues.
Meuser and Mooers (2009) looked at species’ attributes and found that
endemism, the more local a species was, produced greater support for
conservation. Neff and Yang (2013) measured endemic value against the
presence of human-wildlife conict by surveying levels of “pride” inlocal
great White Shark populations in a small n pilot survey (n = 100) in the
beach communities of Fish Hoek and Muizenberg in Cape Town, South
Africa, before and after a shark bite at Fish Hoek beach in 2011. While
support for sharks was low, in comparison to measurements for dolphins
and seals, and stayed low, it did not drop. Indeed, respondent results
showed no statistical decline in support for sharks following the shark bite.
This was repeated in Pepin-Neff and Wynter (2018a, b) studies looking at
public perceptions of sharks in an aquarium and then following shark bites
in the Australian cities of Ballina and Perth.
C. L. PEPIN-NEFF
23
connEctIng HIgHly EmotIonal dIscoursE topolIcy
rEsponsEs: tHEmIlItarIzatIon oFsHarks
andsHark BItEs
The discourse regarding sharks and shark bites was unchallenged at the
turn of the twentieth century because the advent of beach-going and resi-
dential development brought an increase in shark bites that appeared to
conrm and expand on existing scientic beliefs and categorizations about
sharks. The discoveries of human remains inside sharks seemed to “incrim-
inate” sharks and prove scientists’ worst fears (Maxwell 1949). Webster
(1962) notes that one shark may be responsible for a series of bites, given
the distance they travel. He states that in April 1930, “a shark that killed a
man near East London, South Africa, was caught the following night
ninety miles away with identiable portions of the swimmer in its stom-
ach” (Webster 1962, 68). In addition, Coppleson (1958) notes a series of
bites followed by a shark being killed and the lack of subsequent shark
bites “for long periods following a shark hunt.” The connection between
discourse and beach-going can be seen in the framing of shark bites as
“menace” to the public, which followed initial shark bite incidents in the
early 1900s. Sharks that were labeled as dangerous in Australia were now
more so. Man-eating sharks in the US that were once limited to the South
were now feared in the North. Sharks in South Africa were seen as a grow-
ing threat. The result was a militaristic response to sharks and shark bites
based on the relative newness of surf lifesaving clubs, lifeguards, and rst
aid, as well as the remote nature of some locations.
Federal militaries were involved in each nation’s initial responses to
shark bites, and a global awareness of sharks was beginning to take shape.
The onset of World War II and the deployment of hundreds of thousands
of troops across the Pacic would add to this process, as more sharks and
people would come into contact than at any previous time in human
history.
South Africa (1907–1959)
In South Africa, leading shark scientist David Davies (1964, 18) notes that
shark bites are “inextricably bound up with emotion, sensation, horror,
local and national politics.” The rst response to shark bites in South
Africa was to build a beach enclosure in Natal at the “Kenilworth Tea
Room” beach from 1907 to 1928 (Davies 1964, 69; 85). At home, the
THE RISE OFSHARK “ATTACK” DISCOURSE
24
problem of shark bites continued, with ve shark bite incidents in the
South Coast in 1940 and six shark bites in both 1944 and 1947. Davies
(1964, 70) notes that within eight years (1943–1951), there were “twenty
attacks which took place off the Durban beaches.” In 1952, Durban
installed shark nets that were designed similarly to those used in New
South Wales at several beaches (Davies 1964).
During World War II, Davies (1964, 76) notes that the problem of
shark bites became a “serious hazard” due to the “psychological problems
involved in the presence of large numbers of Air Force, Navy, and mer-
chant navy personnel in areas where shark attack could be expected.” A
number of measures were taken among Allied forces abroad. Following
the war, shark bite incidents did not stop. In December 1957, there were
four shark bites in 13days in the Natal South Coast, of which three were
within miles of one another (Davies 1964, 71). In response to the shark
bite cluster, the South African Navy was enlisted and a frigate, “the
S.A.S.Vrystaat, was sent from Cape Town for the purpose of dropping
100 lb depth charges off the South Coast” (Davies 1964, 71–72). More
than 60 charges were dropped along the shoreline.
Australia (1922–1937)
Australia’s national consciousness rst recognized shark bites in 1922 fol-
lowing the fatal bite on 18-year-old surf lifesaver Milton Coughlin during
a community Beach Carnival at Coogee beach in Sydney. This incident is
important because the youth who helped him became a national hero.
This was the rst shark bite fatality for Sydney’s new Surf Life Savers and
the response from the Surf Association called on the government to put
together a commission. In response, observation towers began to be put
up and Coogee beach tried to erect its rst shark-proof enclosure.
In 1934, the NSW Shark Menace Advisory Committee wrote to the
Australian Royal Navy requesting assistance. The Navy told the Committee
that it was using torpedo nets and explosives at Jervis Bay to address con-
cerns about sharks during its training in the ocean. This attention contin-
ued as the Navy supported the development of shark repellents in the
1940s and the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) conducted shark patrols
on beaches in the 1950s. Military concern regarding shark bites would
return to Australia with the Sydney case study in 2009. Following a seri-
ous shark bite incident on a Navy diver, the Navy began issuing electronic
“Shark Shields” to protect divers from sharks in 2010.
C. L. PEPIN-NEFF
25
US (1916–1946)
The militarized responses in the US began in 1916 following a cluster of
four fatal shark bites over 12days along a New Jersey river. The Governor
of New Jersey refused to act, citing the length of the coastline, which
prompted calls for action from President Woodrow Wilson. The shark bite
incidents were discussed during the War Cabinet meeting on 14 July 1916
(Webster 1962, 91). Webster (1962, 91) notes that Secretary of the
Treasury McAdoo “instructed the Coast Guard to ‘use every means of
driving the sharks away or killing them.’” In addition, a local shark hunt
took place at the direction of the state’s National Guard. A shark patrol
began, in which boats dragged pieces of lamb up and down the river with
“riemen ready on the fantail to shoot any sharks that lunged at the bait”
(Webster 1962, 85). Steel and wooden fences were placed in the waters of
river beaches (Webster 1962, 86).
During World War II, shark bite stories following torpedoing of boats
in the Pacic were particularly unsettling. The sinking of the Nova Scotia
in 1942 and the USS Indianapolis in 1945 was key to movements to
develop anti-shark technology. Davies (1964, 78) notes that stories of
these incidents were affecting the “morale of Allied air force and naval
personnel.” As a result, the US began a new project in 1942in the Ofce
of Scientic Research and Development to protect service members adrift
in the open ocean from shark bites (Davies 1964, 79). The Ofce devel-
oped a packet called the “Shark Chaser” that was given to all personnel
between 45th parallel North and South. Davies notes that this provided
comfort and “considerable psychological value” (Davies 1964, 80). After
the war, research continued, and in 1958, American attention to shark
bites on humans led to studies of shark behavior and the establishment of
the US Navy’s Shark Research Panel (Caldicott etal. 2001, 447) and new
discourse categorizing human-shark encounters.
tHE lEgacy oFHIgHly EmotIonal dIscoursE
onpolIcy rEsponsEs: tHEcrImInalIzatIon oFsHarks
andsHark BItEs
Literature on criminalization is broad and includes research into mental
illness (Abramson 1972; Steury 1991; Engel and Silver 2001) and com-
puter crime (Hollinger and Lanza-Kaduce 1988), as well as labeling the-
ory and moral panics (Cohen 1972, 2011; Goode and Ben-Yehuda 1994).
THE RISE OFSHARK “ATTACK” DISCOURSE
26
Institutional measures of this process, which include arrests, prosecutions,
and incarcerations (Steury 1991), can be used as a measure and as a socio-
political layering that combines media framing, policy actor advocacy
(Hollinger and Lanza-Kaduce 1988), and legislative action. Targets of
criminalization are identied for their objective harm, “deviant” behavior,
cultural conicts, or threat to social norms. The dread associated with a
threat to life or a treasured way of life results in methods of social control
that attempt to reinforce the meaning behind these power dynamics. As a
result, the criminalization of an issue is intended to do two things: rst,
send a message to society about what is valued, and secondly, to deter a
perceived threat. Both of these messages are sent by placing an unjust
burden or punishment on a less valued target (Engel and Silver 2001).
Shark “attacks” became part of the political landscape as they moved
from the realm of military governance and service member safety to civil-
ian beach safety. The result was the criminalization of shark bites by states
and local governments. Fundamental to this process is the meaning that is
given to the action by labeling the offending behavior, directing an author-
ity to respond, and executing a community-supported response. Emotions
are central to this process, as emotional meaning and value are the triggers
of the problem and inform the solution.
t’Hart (2008, 41) notes “emotional control” and the “‘management’
of individual and collective emotions generated by the breakdown of rou-
tine symbolic order.” This could be seen in 1935, when the New South
Wales Shark Menace Advisory Committee submitted a report of beach
safety recommendations following a series of shark bite incidents. The
report stated that it was acting to address a “fear complex” (NSW 1935,
26) that had developed. The goals of criminalization therefore are to use
policy selection as a way of displacing or shifting emotions. Governance
structures are established and symbols are designed to cue this transition
and reect the meaning given to the “in-group” that is supported and the
“out-group” that is punished. Dr. Coppleson testied before the Shark
Menace Advisory Committee in 1934 and reported that one shark may be
responsible for multiple incidents (NSW 1935, 32).
The Committee recommended the culling of sharks as part of a beach
shing operation to catch sharks in 1935, and state funding for shark nets
along all New South Wales beaches began in 1937. Following World War
II, the program was expanded to additional beaches.
In 1957, in South Africa, laws were passed to establish the anti-sharks
board in 1957. A statutory authority called the Natal Anti-Sharks Board
C. L. PEPIN-NEFF
27
was established. Action was taken at the local level to put barriers and nets
along beaches after 1957 and 1958 (Davies 1964, 72). Davies (1964, 54)
notes that the bull shark (or Zambezi shark, named for the Zambezi River)
was seen as culpable for shark bites. He notes that “the incrimination of
the Zambezi shark was obtained from the positive identication of tooth
fragments.” Here we see that shark bites are reviewed as crime scenes, with
evidence used to identify the perpetrator, followed by efforts to respond.
The US began long-line catches in Hawaii in 1959 (Wetherbee etal.
1994) and New Jersey in 1961. Yet in Florida, historically, shark bites
have had a number of distinguishing features. First, the severity has
been reasonably low, with only four fatalities in the state between 1959
and 1990 (USLA 2002, (1) Second, there has been only one fatality on
a lifeguard (USLA 2002, (2) This is an important characteristic, which
is different from the experiences of South Africa and Australia. The
absence of lifeguard fatalities also removed a highly emotional element.
Third, there is a difference in the types of sharks involved in the shark
bites. The species of shark is important because there are different
emotional connotations toward certain sharks and incidents are
different.
The legacy of criminality from shark bites can be seen in each of the
three case studies. Responses look at spatiality (closeness to population
centers), temporality (frequency of shark bites), and severity (number of
fatalities). Chief among these are territorial responses. Government initia-
tives are aimed at (and titled) “shark control” rather than at beach control,
despite the fact that management of beaches may be more successful in
reducing risks than attempting to manage shark species. Human encroach-
ment on these coastal zones can lead to habitat destruction and oversh-
ing, which contribute to shark bites (Hazin etal. 2008). These locations
also often serve both as locations where there is high water use by bathers
and as waste zones from outfalls, which can increase the risk of a shark bite
incident (Hazin etal. 2008).
tHE Impact oFJaws
Jaws stands out like no movie before its time. This lm provides a critical
linkage between the evolutionary fear of sharks and cultural stereotypes of
shark behavior that trigger emotional cues to stimulate individual and
political behavior. As Biskind (1975, 1) notes, “Jaws needs no introduc-
tion.” Based on the book Jaws (1974) by Peter Benchley, the lm by
THE RISE OFSHARK “ATTACK” DISCOURSE
28
director Steven Spielberg opened on 22 June 1975in the US and featured
the story of a “rogue” shark terrorizing a small seaside community (Jaws
1975). Biskind (1975) labeled the lm a “middle-class Moby Dick” for its
broad appeal. The effect of Jaws included (a) increased public awareness of
sharks, (b) greater public concern at East Coast beaches, and (c) an
increase in sport shing and sales of shark jaws or teeth. The lm was
Hollywood’s rst summer blockbuster and broke the record of gross
domestic sales in the US as the fastest-selling movie of all time and the
most protable to date. Within 78days, Jaws had gross income totaling
US$124,322,872in the US alone (Rubey 1976).
In addition to ticket sales for the lm, public fascination of sharks grew.
Simón’s (1981) study of Jaws as a “fad” that inuenced mass behavior
compared data before and after the release of the movie. Simon noted
dramatic increases in the sales of shark jaws and teeth, newspaper coverage
on sharks, shark books being published, museum attendance, and shark
books checked out of the library (Simón 1981). He states that a desire for
shark teeth increased in particular, noting that “after Jaws individual orders
for 20,000 to 100,000 took place with the heaviest order occurring in the
summer of 1975” (Simón 1981, 776). The commercial response by the
public’s fascination led to other Jaws-style lms, including Mako: Jaws of
Death (1976); Claws (1977), about a killer bear; Orca (1977); Piranha
(1978); and Cujo, about a killer dog (1983). Sequels to Jaws included
Jaws II (1978), Jaws III (1983), and Jaws: The Revenge (1987). Indeed,
the place of sharks as the stars within the movie industry would expand to
include Deep Blue Sea (1999) and Open Water (2003). In 2013, the cable
channel Sci aired the lm Sharknado (2013) about a tornado that enve-
lopes hundreds of sharks and takes them inland, which received more than
604,000 tweets during its 90-minute broadcast, making it one of the most
tweeted periods ever (Hayden 2013).
Why the fascination with Jaws was successful while others failed to
pique public interest is a key question that Simón (1981) considers. “Why
will one lm spark off a mass behaviour while another lm (or television
special or news story) will not” (Simón 1981, 782)? This question echoes
the political dynamics of what elements make some issues hot topics,
pressing problems of the “issue attention cycle” (Downs 1972). Simon
argues that media attention is key as well as topics that are “fascinating”
and pre-exist in the public’s mind. Rubey (1976) notes that the original
Jaws “cashed in on the emotions already attached to people-eating sharks
by creating ctional and lmic structures which involve audiences with the
C. L. PEPIN-NEFF
29
shark as an image.” In addition, Tan (1995, 30) notes that lms elicit
emotions in ways that are “self-enhancing.” Tan (1995, 30) notes that
“once fear has been aroused, say by the sight of a shark n amidst a crowd
standing in the sea, as in Jaws (1975), the viewer is driven by an emotional
tendency to keep watching this source of threat.” Fear of sharks remains a
key legacy of Jaws in the public domain.
The movie Jaws was designed to tap into the public’s fears about sharks.
Jaws took a primed emotional subject and brought “these moments of
primal terror” (Rubey 1976) to life in several strategic ways. First, the
script was deliberate. Victims of the shark included a young girl at night, a
young boy in the middle of the day, an experienced sherman, a man on
the 4th of July, and Quint, a shark hunter and World War II veteran. The
shark itself is described in hyperbolic terms and given scientic credibility
through the marine biologist (Hooper) played by Robert Dreyfus as well
as the use of real footage of White Sharks from South Australia. Hooper
describes the shark as a “rogue,” building on the theory of Dr. Victor
Coppleson. The lm script (Jaws 1975) reads:
Chief Brody: Now this shark that, that swims alone …
Hooper: A rogue.
Chief Brody: Rogue, yeah, now this guy, he– he keeps swimming around
in a place where the feeding is good until the food supply is
gone, right?
Hooper: It’s called Territoriality. That’s the theory … A theory I hap-
pen to agree with.
Rubey notes: “Jaws does treat the great White Shark as something
larger and more mysterious than a hungry sh. It develops from a mind-
less eating machine to a malevolent force” (Rubey 1976). Echoing this
sentiment, the Time magazine covered the lm by running an iconic cover
of a shark, jaws open, with the title “Super Shark” (Time 1975).
Adding to the sense of dread that accompanies Jaws are the camera
angles and the music. The “shark’s-eye camera” (Rubey 1976) views the
swimmers from below before coming in for an “attack.” The music also
played a central role in the lm and stayed with the audience. The refrain
“duh-DUN, duh-DUN” aroused and cued the emotions of moviegoers
during and after the lm. It identied the presence of the shark without
seeing the shark. Eladhari etal. (2006, 3) note that the use of a leitmotiv
identies “when the shark comes close in the movie Jaws.” Biskind (1975)
THE RISE OFSHARK “ATTACK” DISCOURSE
30
describes the build-up as “the dinner theme” (Biancorosso 2010, 320)
and notes the important use of rapid heartbeats cords to build anxiety.
Beyond the lm itself, the marketing of Jaws sought to highlight these
primal connections. Gottlieb’s book The Jaws Log (1975, 94) notes that
the lm company’s production department spent 1.5 million dollars devel-
oping a marketing campaign to advance “Jaws Consciousness.” The goal
was to build up a social enemy along the lines of Frankenstein and King
Kong that the public could identify with. Gottlieb (1975, 93–94) states
that the movie studio’s public relations team “planned the sort of satura-
tion campaign usually only Presidential campaigns receive.” He highlights
the role of radio commercials that were used to build up the thriller and
“Jaws mania” by stating, “[N]one of men’s fantasies of evil can compare
with the reality of ‘Jaws’” (Gottlieb 1975, 94).
The impact of the lm was a nationalized and an internationalized
increase in fear of sharks that existed apart from the reality of shark bites
along the coast. Krop and Krause (1976, 293) reviewed cases of “shark
phobia” and stated, “[D]ue to a mass viewing of the movie Jaws a wide-
spread fear of sharks has been increasingly observed.” The New York Times
reported a spike in reporting of sharks along American East Coast beaches.
An article states that “[t]he impact of the motion picture ‘Jaws’ is being
felt along the East Coast where town authorities and lifeguards are being
besieged with reports of sharks” (New York Times 1975). Amplifying the
marketing and merchandizing of Jaws were actual shark bites that occurred
during the summer of 1975in Daytona Beach, Florida. Simón (1981)
reported declines in businesses in these areas up to “30%”; however, it is
unclear if this was the result of attention to the shark bites or the economic
recession (Simón 1981, 783).
Two reports were conducted following these incidents in Florida. The
rst report was conducted by an advisory committee of the Daytona Beach
Area Chamber of Commerce in September 1975 (Bullion 1976). The
second was conducted by the Florida Sea Grant Program in November
1975. The Chamber of Commerce report stated:
[T]he shark attack on a youth surng off New Smyrna Beach in late Spring,
1975 became a national story that was linked to remarks on a national televi-
sion program that alleged Daytona Beach to be one of the world’s most
dangerous beaches for sharks. The attack and subsequent publicity, com-
bined with widespread interest and concern with sharks caused many people
from across the country to write or call Daytona concerning sharks. (Bullion
1976, 9)
C. L. PEPIN-NEFF
31
However, the Chamber’s report found that the previous nature of
minor shark bites with the booming population growth had not been a
problem in the past. It stated that “shark attack in the area has been his-
torically of a single rather than multiple nature” (Bullion 1976: 9).
The scientic conference held in November was entitled “Sharks and
Man– A Perspective.” This included sessions on the “Impacts of Sharks
on Tourism” and whether shark bites were a liability for lawsuits (Seaman
1976, iii). The report on proceedings stated, “[W]e are not aware that
there are fewer visitors due to sharks” (Seaman 1976, 8).
Following the release of Jaws, shark derbies increased around the US
and the world (Hueter 1991). The New York Times reported on the
increased attention. It quoted one captain, who stated, “That movie broke
the business wide open.” He added, “I would say we had a 50 percent
increase this season of people chartering boats to go out after shark and
other big game” (Savage 1975). In addition, an expansion of US sheries
in the 1970s identied sharks as an underutilized source. Previous percep-
tions had sharks seen as “a poor man’s marlin” (Stone etal. 1998, 216).
The result was an increase in shing of sharks, which placed man in a new
role of controlling their fate. In 1993, the US National Marine Fisheries
Service (NMFS) reported that “the appearance of man as a predator has
confronted sharks with a mortality source that they cannot withstand”
(NMFS 1993). Interestingly, this example mirrors the way movies inu-
enced fast-acting policy developments, including the ban on nuclear power
and anti-nuclear sentiment following the release of the movie The China
Syndrome in 1979 (Sunstein and Zeckhauser 2011) and the lm War
Games, which resulted in the criminalization of computer misuse in 1983
(Hollinger and Lanza-Kaduce 1988).
The release of the lm Jaws in 1975 brought the graphic fear of a serial
killer criminal shark home to millions and gave rise to the celluloid mani-
festation of the “man-eater” label, which suggested an intent-driven mon-
ster seeking out human prey. It painted the picture of a one-dimensional
outcome for the human-shark experience, which is a component of the
“Jaws effect” (Neff and Hueter 2013; Neff 2015). The impact of the pub-
lic’s attention to this dreaded outcome can still be seen today, as the phrase
“shark attack” conjures schemas representative of the movie. Indeed, its
wide-scale popularity and familiarity have inuenced future generations
based on efforts to tap into this schema. In the US, one of the most-
watched cable programs of the year is Shark Week on the Discovery
Channel. Nearly 30 million people watch this series each year. Papson
THE RISE OFSHARK “ATTACK” DISCOURSE
32
(1992) reviewed the style of this documentary series in 1990 (it has run
every year since 1987) and notes that “most encounters with the shark
take place in feature lms” (Papson 1992, 68). As a result, the perceived
reality of sharks is ctional because documentaries use the devices of c-
tional movies to “capture viewer attention” (Papson 1992, 67). Thus, for
30years, Shark Week has continued the tradition of Jaws by relying on the
danger posed by sharks and the “threat of a shark attack to engage the
viewer” (Papson 1992, 75).
People often associate sharks with the dreaded outcome from a fatal,
consumptive event, regardless of the actual outcome. This perceived out-
come is already primed with a visual, based on latent fears. Leiserowitz
(2004) notes that that “the vivid imagery and theme music from this
movie still reverberate in the public mind, stoking individual fears, inu-
encing behaviour (such as vacation and swimming preferences) and gener-
ating countless secondary ripple effects, including re-emergent,
media-driven ‘shark panics’ such as was seen in the US in the summer of
2001” (Leiserowitz 2004, 24).
conclusIon
The human-shark relationship is not a new conict. Current attitudes and
policymaking are the continuation of a primal threat narrative that contin-
ues to evolve as animals, particularly people, live alongside apex predators,
particularly sharks. The result is a political dynamic that is moderated
heavily by pre-existing evolutionary judgments about life or death issues.
This bias cannot be ignored in current policymaking and can extend to
other issues. Evolutionarily prioritized emotions about select targets make
them prone to social constructions and articial stimuli. The priming of
policy responses toward threat aversion and emotional displacement is
policy-relevant data, particularly due to their reliance on speed as a func-
tion of survival. Indeed, the speed of emotional responses from shark bites
is tied to the speed of political responses to alleviate the threat or emotion
connected to the threat.
To be clear, the argument being made is not that emotions can only
come from instinct, or that policy responses come only from instinctual
emotional sources. Rather, a combination of emotional sources inuences
the way issues are prioritized and the opening of policy windows. For
instance, highly emotional issues such as race or local values may inuence
a policy response during a salience-prone period. Yet, it is also the case that
C. L. PEPIN-NEFF
33
cultural feelings often build upon instinctual sensibilities. In all, emotions
are conditional to these combinations as well as to contextual factors.
The data afrm that the shark bite case studies in Florida, Cape Town,
and Sydney were highly emotional events. Each location was represented
by emotive language in news accounts and reacted with threat-averse pol-
icy actions. Emotions can also be amplied by articial stimuli, such as
lms and media. Individually or in combination, the intensity to a given
environment triggers individual behavior that can inuence political
responses. As a result, it is also important to consider the combination of
an instinctually high emotion event, like a shark bite, on a socially con-
structed emotion-laden target population, such as a child, which intensi-
es the nature of the event. Media coverage emphasizing the details of this
event may further an emotional cascade that can engulf the political scene.
The enactment of policies included shark hunts, shark derbies, and
beach nets as punitive measures for the perceived public good. The crimi-
nalization of human-wildlife conicts into animal violence moved “crimes
of nature” to “crimes by nature.” The laws also offered a symbolic mes-
sage about the low cultural value of sharks and the high cultural value
placed on the beach and leisure activities.
Having identied high emotion events, the task becomes understand-
ing why different policy responses are enacted. This book moves forward
to review the way emotion is facilitated or moderated by the social con-
texts and structures, including (a) political emotionality, (b) salience, (c)
policy thresholds, and (d) policy entrepreneurs. This includes a review of
the way in which quick emotional responses interact with the speed of
political responses. These may be mitigated by government experience
with an issue, electoral majorities, established structures, and policy actor
expertise. Quick political xes to anxious moments may not always to be
possible; however, ready-made solutions may facilitate an emotional tran-
sition to navigate the issue. Moreover, high emotion characteristics may
allow policy entrepreneurs to build policy responses that react to the
emotion and speed the issues present. Davies notes that following clus-
ters of shark bites, often “demands for immediate solution[s] have been
made by individuals and local authorities” (Davies 1964, 19). Indeed,
this analysis is based on the premise that there is a relationship between
prioritized emotional characteristics, policy design elements, and the
likelihood of policy responses. This idea will be examined in the follow-
ing chapters.
THE RISE OFSHARK “ATTACK” DISCOURSE
34
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C. L. PEPIN-NEFF
39© The Author(s) 2019
C. L. Pepin-Neff, Flaws,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10976-9_3
CHAPTER 3
Governing Emotion: How toAnalyze
Emotional Political Situations
This chapter introduces the theory behind this book. It addresses the way
governments cope with highly emotional issues and events. Emotions and
political emotionality provide a frame for understanding the central ques-
tion of public policy: “Who gets what, when, and how” (Lasswell 1950)?
This emotional lens is important because it highlights how feelings can
facilitate the distribution of political penalties. These may be internal pres-
sures for individual actors because a sensitive issue can also be also tempo-
rally acute, representing a problem that matters, to the people that matter,
during a time that matters. Alternatively, there may be a collective and
cascading distribution of negative consequences based on how many peo-
ple care about an issue, how much they care, and for how long. The nature
of emotional prejudices ferments exogenous or endogenous penalties that
help issues gain attention and rise on the agenda.
For instance, the emotional nature of issues and events is often predict-
able and results in increases in salience (Downs 1972; Birkland 1998;
Baumgartner and Jones 2009) that inuences media attention and mobi-
lizes the public in ways that distribute penalties toward political actors.
The mobilization of political pressures can include attention by the media
that leads to government action (Wolfe 2012) and collective public behav-
ior, including calls to government representatives (Langbein and Lotwis
1990), emails to legislators (Bergan 2009), social media engagement
(Obar etal. 2012), online petitions (Vromen 2008), interest group lobby-
ing (Walker 1991; Baumgartner and Jones 2009; Baumgartner and Leech
40
2001), social protest (Gould 2009; Jasper 1998), and shifts in voting
behavior (Achen and Bartels 2012). These penalties are often managed by
those most vulnerable to them, and these actors attempt to inuence what
tools and policies governments use to defend themselves. As a result, I
argue that highly emotional policy domains are designed in ways to allevi-
ate those penalties, including distributing public emotion.
This chapter is an argument for how we contextualize emotions in pol-
icy analysis. Public policy research requires an investment in theoretical as
well as practical examinations of the role of emotions in policymaking for
several reasons. First, while policy studies has welcomed the introduction
of statistical analysis and neurological evidence of behavior, it has been less
inclined to consider the theoretical connections offered by political sociol-
ogy, feminism, and other social science elds. Second, there are big ques-
tions that public policy still cannot answer alone and a more comprehensive
emotional lens helps with this analysis. For example, policy responses to
highly emotional issues, even the same issue, often produce different
results. This may require considering the scientic role of a certain stimu-
lus being received by a group as well as the systems of government in
question and the distributive effects of policy responses on the public.
Science alone and public policy alone are not equipped to address these
questions. Thirdly, public policy research contends with a constellation of
emotions and the social and political machinery that lters them. What is
needed at this stage is a way to begin examining the interaction effects of
certain emotional political situations with institutional arrangements.
Finally, these considerations of emotions and policy arrangements are crit-
ical to policy studies because there is signicant potential for policies that
manipulate the public. Eleanor Ostrom notably raised the alarm in stating
that the behavioral aspects of political science are “vulnerable to manipula-
tion” (Ostrom 1998, 16). She added, “[C]itizens need additional skills
and knowledge to resolve the social dilemmas they face is left unaddressed.
Their moral decisions are not discussed” (Ostrom 1998, 18). This chapter
builds on this suggestion by considering different categories of emotional
political situations, issues, and contexts, which facilitate different political
penalties.
To begin, emotions reect both evolutionary and socially adapted hier-
archies that prejudice certain issues, at certain times, in the policy process.
Emotion is identied as what is more tangibly felt. This chapter moves
forward in four sections: First, I review the consideration of emotions in
leading theories of the policy process. Secondly, I highlight ways in which
C. L. PEPIN-NEFF
41
emotions and political emotionality can be considered more broadly in the
distributive nature of public policy. Thirdly, I propose an emotion-policy
framework that looks at how actors and institutions attempts to defend
against these distributions of penalties. Lastly, I conclude by noting the
implications of a focus on political emotionality and penalty distribution in
policy analysis.
Policy ScienceS andtheemotional turn
Political science has been a core contributor in the social science’s turn
toward emotions and affect, including theories of the policy process, crisis
management, and behavioral public policy. For instance, multiple streams
theory (MST) (Kingdon 1984) notes the importance of public mood and
the way emotive features may be used to manipulate actors (Zahariadis
2007). Emotions impact the way an issue obtains attention, the way policy
entrepreneurs use emotion to get their issue on the agenda, and the selec-
tion of policy outputs. Zahariadis (2007) notes that “policy makers and
entrepreneurs use labels and symbols that have specic cognitive referents
and emotional impact” (Zahariadis 2007, 70). Emotion can assist in xat-
ing attention to an issue. Moreover, emotional issues and emotion prim-
ing can inuence the context of government behavior (Zahariadis 2007,
77). Ultimately, MST underlies the way emotions play a key role in “polit-
ical manipulation” (Zahariadis 2007, 84).
The Advocacy Coalition Framework (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1993)
recognizes the role of prospect theory (Kahneman and Tversky 1979) and
“Devil Shift” (Sabatier etal. 1987). In the rst, while losses are perceived
to be more important than gains, Sunstein (2005, 66) notes that “pros-
pect theory does not set out a special role for emotions.” However, in
Devil Shift, extremely negative feelings about an opponent inltrate an
organization’s way of thinking and operating. Sabatier etal. (1987) note
that understanding these motivations is important because of the potential
for abuse in the political system, stating, “[D]evil shift has all the worst
features of a positive feedback loop: the more one views opponents as
malevolent and very powerful, the more likely one is to resort to question-
able measures to preserve one’s interest.” In addition, punctuated equilib-
rium theory (Baumgartner and Jones 2009) makes a key underlying
contribution as a theory of information processing and attributes bounded
rationality (Simon 1996) of individuals to governments. Attentiveness is
impacted by emotionality and inuences the policy image. True, Jones,
GOVERNING EMOTION: HOW TOANALYZE EMOTIONAL POLITICAL…
42
and Baumgartner (1999, 161) note that “[p]olicy images are a mixture of
empirical information and emotive appeals.” Punctuated equilibrium’s
consideration of how deep core beliefs motivate actors is also important to
the concept of the “delta parameter” (Ostrom 1998), which is consistent
with how much someone cares about an issue.
New concepts and theories about emotions are also contributing to
policy studies piece by piece outside of well-established frameworks, as
Marcus (2000, 222) notes, “a consensus on the effects of emotion in poli-
tics remains to be achieved.” Lodge and Hood (2002, 4) look at policy
responses to highly emotional dog bites and note that institutions in
“forced-choice” situations “adopt strategies for survival in the face of
environmental shocks.” In addition, Lodge and Taber (2005, 455) have
contributed signicantly to understanding the role of emotions in public
policy with their review of the concept of “hot cognition” and their exper-
iments, which found that feelings toward political leaders, groups, and
issues can be triggered “automatically” if there is “congruence” between
the concepts (e.g. cockroach as “disgusting”). Indeed, this research was
joined by the landmark work in neuroscience by De Martino etal. (2006,
684), who looked at brain function in regard to choices. They found “a
key role for an emotional system in mediating decision biases.”
In addition, Druckman and McDermott (2008, 318) reviewed the
effects of emotion on the framing and selection of risks. They note that
“emotions serve motivating functions” that impact how individuals make
choices. In particular, Weber (2013, 414) examined the role of emotion in
political ad campaigns (Weber 2013) and found that “anger emerges as a
mobilizing force.” In short, political organizations use emotions to recruit,
sustain, and mobilize actors (Jasper 1998); candidates use emotional
appeals to inuence voters (Brader 2005); and elected ofcials use emo-
tions to achieve policy outcomes (Lupia and Menning 2009). It is there-
fore no stretch of theory or practice to suggest that policy responses are
designed and used by governments to distribute public emotions in ways
that facilitate or interrupt penalties such as rebellious public behavior.
Recent studies in behavioral economics and public policy have taken
this research one step further and applied it to policy implementation.
They rely on scientic advances and theory-building by looking at the
distributive effect of policy responses on the public. Nudge (Thaler and
Sunstein 2008) literature considers “how cognitive pathways, social norms
and moral convictions inuence thinking and behavior” (Moseley and
Stoker 2013, 5). Predicting how the public will respond to a given message
C. L. PEPIN-NEFF
43
or stimulus requires understanding how people’s emotions inuence their
thinking and weighting about different issues, events, or tasks. This dis-
tributive look at public policy has been highlighted by the risk literature
following crises (McConnell 2003), focusing events (Birkland 1998), and
moral panics (Goode and Ben-Yehuda 1994); however, this chapter is
considering emotions and politically emotionality more acutely. For
instance, while risk theory looks at the way emotions make an event seem
more probable, I am examining how the emotionality of an event distrib-
utes penalties to political actors. Douglas (1985, 67) notes that “expert
risk analysis takes as its decision-making unit the individual agent, exclud-
ing from the choice any moral or political feedback that he may be receiv-
ing from his surrounding society.” With these components, concepts, and
frameworks in mind, this chapter focuses on emotion’s effects in the policy
process. As Weible (2014, 5) notes, “[O]ne implication of the continuous
and interactive nature of policy process research is a need for multiple
theories to highlight, describe, and explain different and sometimes over-
lapping or nested partitions of the policy process to account for a variety
of interactions often expressed as inputs and outputs.”
Broader concePtionS ofemotionS inPuBlic Policy
Attention in agenda setting is mitigated by relative emotional salience and
political power. Underlying this argument are well-established assump-
tions about the hierarchy of emotions and the hierarchy of identities that
function in the political system. To connect these more fully in the policy
process I argue that public policy should incorporate a multidisciplinary
understanding of emotions in three ways.
First, I argue that “political emotionality” is a social condition that dis-
tributes predictable political penalties relative to other competing stimuli,
social contexts, and the power dynamics for a given issue. Emotionality is
a political concept because emotions do not stand in isolation, but are the
political manifestation of biases that prejudice and allow the distribution
of emotional expressions, to certain groups, on certain issues, at certain
times. This is based on the combination of the hardwired affective, physi-
ological, and necessarily salient response to an issue or event (Damasio
1994); the socially constructed and cultural sensitivities or amplications
of that emotion relative to hierarchies of identity (Crenshaw 1991;
Schneider and Ingram 1993), discourse, images, and causal stories (Stone
1989) (particularly intentionality); and the emotional rules and norms
GOVERNING EMOTION: HOW TOANALYZE EMOTIONAL POLITICAL…
44
that govern emotional expression (Hochschild 1983). Public policy and
implementation therefore plays a key role in challenging or reproducing
norms that set forth how groups are viewed and which emotional rules
apply.
Degrees of political emotionality and disruptions that overow estab-
lished boundaries or expectations place pressures on political actors and
institutions based on the level of vulnerability, which helps determine
whether a social problem is a political problem. One measure of this is
how many people care about an issue, how much they care, and for how
long. This builds on Crawford and Ostrom (1995), who “refer to this
internal valuation as a delta parameter that is added to or subtracted from
the objective costs of an action.” The delta parameter is an “internal valu-
ation– positive or negative– to taking particular types of action” (Ostrom
1998, 9). The authors note that “the delta parameters originating from
internal sources can be thought of as the guilt or shame felt when breaking
a prescription and the pride or ‘warm glow’ felt when following a prescrip-
tion” (Crawford and Ostrom 1995, 587). Another measure is the target
of the emotionality. Groups with more political power may cue a bias that
presents a more sympathetic case and supports widespread caring.
The emotional rules of engagement on political issues and how social
movements mobilize build off of political sociology and Bourdieu’s
(1977) concept of “habitus,” which are the emotional norms and rules
that govern a situation. The theoretical work on emotional habitus is use-
ful because political emotionality is an interaction effect. It is not simply
that we are dealing with “western” emotions, but rather that we are deal-
ing with an entire western apparatus that privileges white, wealthy, patri-
archal, English-speaking, cis-gendered, able-bodied, heterosexual, and
masculine emotions, and allocates power to the distribution and repro-
duction of those emotions, by those people and the media that desire their
funds. So an issue may gain attention but exist within rules that place the
issue within a limited emotional hierarchy and which can be dissipated.
Individual cultural arrangements may and do vary, but the dominant
socially constructed contribution to political emotionality paradigms is set
forth above. This is afrmed by Marks (1999, 619), who examined the
way the feelings of those with disabilities can be invalidated by social rules
and manifest “emotional oppression” by facilitating internalized self-
disregard that reproduces social oppression. However, it is important to
note that this is not a linear process. The imposition of policies against a
group can also destabilize the emotional habitus of that target population
C. L. PEPIN-NEFF
45
(Gould 2009) and create new feelings about the state that alter the emo-
tional norms and rules that restrict action, the acceptability of action, or
the support for action.
Second, emotions are a resource that is managed by the government.
This is consistent with research in sociology, feminist studies, and psychol-
ogy that consider the real costs of emotional labor (Hochschild 1983;
Brotheridge and Grandey 2002), which Hochschild (1983, 7) denes as
labor that “requires one to induce or suppress feelings in order to sustain
the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in oth-
ers.” Or put another way, it is the emotional effort and labor that is exerted
by someone to present one type of emotional state in order to receive
positive feedback from the client. In the same way that costs can be
incurred in the commercial regulation of an emotional state, “emotional
taxation” can exist when the policies of the state place an emotional price
for a particular group engaging on a particular side of a given issue as a
citizen.
Finally, emotionality as a political condition distributes penalties and
tests the strength of political actors’ institutions. Levels of insulation or
vulnerability may depend on the intensity, duration, and relative salience
of the issue. This can also be affected by the widespread distribution and
the ease of communication to enable shared emotions to motivate collec-
tive action across communication devices or in heavily populated areas.
Social media is in many ways emotional media and it is important to rec-
ognize this core function, which can increase pressures and require gov-
ernments to develop policies and policy threshold arrangements to
reinforce and protect themselves from these exogenous forces. The goal of
institutions is to design tools that interrupt this combination of factors,
which may be done by opening the political process and introducing a
policy that is directed at the emotion itself, the target group itself, the time
period, or the relative salience. In short, the policy responses and arrange-
ments offer actors and governments a number of instruments and tools to
try and mitigate the emotionality of an issue.
attention andSalience
Salience is the degree of importance and corresponding attention an issue
is given relative to other competing issues. For instance, slow news cycles
(such as summertime or holidays) are referred to as salience-prone periods
of time. Conversely, stimuli that have survival value, such as threats,
GOVERNING EMOTION: HOW TOANALYZE EMOTIONAL POLITICAL…
46
changes in norms, and uncertainty, acquire advantaged importance and
greater focus, which often translates into intense news cycles. However,
the circumstances that represent increased salience may also include a
reduced capacity to absorb those characteristics, favoring less complex
narratives and responses. In other words, salience comes at a price. The
more intense the attention on an issue, the harder it can be to absorb all
of the various elements. To cope, policies that reinforce “known knowns,”
heuristics, and “rules of thumb” (Sunstein 2006) are more likely to be
introduced if acute high-salience situations become overwhelming. This is
consistent with the premises of “bounded rationality” (Simon 1996) and
“limited capacity” theory (Lang 2000). As a result, I argue that clustered
stimuli can produce faster responses followed by lower policy thresholds.
This process relies on the adoption of heuristic elements, which feed illu-
sory corollaries and historical analogies, based on an event’s representa-
tiveness and availability. These methods reinforce the clustering of “like”
events based on their frequency, correlation, or both, and stimulate an
aversion to the costs imposed by dreaded aggregate outcomes. In other
words, a series of very bad things have occurred in quick succession, so to
cope, they are linked together as one big event to understand it better, and
during these periods of stress, political actors provide familiar themes to
act as shortcuts to convey points to the public. In response, policy reac-
tions act to interrupt the outcome aggregation clustering and associated
emotional cascades, which can produce overreactions in the short term
and policy legacies over the long term.
Indeed, highly emotional issues can create unique social and political
problems because these socially aversive conditions take up personal
resources, leaving a limited capacity for people to consider the issue. This
is important because the sequential frequency or severity of events can
overwhelm the public when stimuli or events are clustered. This is consis-
tent with the economic literature which suggests that in the face of sus-
tained or repeated highly negative events, there can be an aggregation of
these outcomes into a psychological condition called “temporal combin-
ing” (referred to here as outcome aggregation) (Linville and Fischer 1991,
8). An example of this is referring to the nearly 3000 people murdered in
NewYork, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C. as “9/11” and referring
to the 13 students and a teacher killed at Columbine High School, simply
as “Columbine.” Here, the multiple individual events are aggregated or
combined together into one larger event and then referred to with a men-
tal shortcut to allow people to comprehend such a tragedy.
C. L. PEPIN-NEFF
47
The policy implications of temporal combining or aggregate outcomes
rely on the way responses link events together or separate them. In both,
the role of emotions is key. Linville and Fischer (1991) highlight the way
temporal combining aggregates multiple emotional events together into
one larger, more intense outcome. For another example, a fatal shark bite
could be a high-emotion event, but the occurrence of three shark bites in
a short period near a populated area may aggregate the events together,
creating a high-emotion aggregation. As a result, the distressing situation
moves the issue more easily across the social threshold for tolerance and
impinges on process capacity, overwhelming the public and facilitating
political pressure such as interest-group unrest. This aspect of highly emo-
tional events is important because some widespread distressing situations
can only be resolved through legislative action, and this imposes penalties
on government actors to act quickly.
Underlying this analysis there are a number of assumptions. First, pol-
icy responses should occur faster for multiple negative events which: (a)
occur more closely together and (b) are seen as correlated. This is based
on the assumption that both people and governments desire loss buffering
following episodes where multiple negative events have been combined,
or “extreme loss clustering.” The aggregation of negative events repre-
sents one of the most averse situations because it demands greater energy
and a reduced capacity of resources. This results in attempts to rapidly
relieve this aversive condition. Immediate responses attempt to return
situations to the norm, in which individuals and communities consider
their emotions based on separate outcomes.
Secondly, the direction of policy responses is focused on positively
emotional tools that disaggregate outcomes. Linville and Fischer’s (1991)
“renewable resources” model argues that the introduction of a new “posi-
tive” event outcome interrupts the aggregation of negative outcomes.
This advantages the selection of publicly acknowledged “positive” reac-
tions to achieve the desired goal. The diagnosis of an event as representa-
tive of a familiar situation and the selection of a correspondingly
acknowledged positive solution quickly shift the affective or emotional
states. The response meets the demand of providing emotional relief, even
though it may not reduce risk. As a result, policy responses favor historical
path dependencies to relieve social anxiety and in order to disrupt the
aggregation more rapidly.
Examples of recognized positive outcomes include events intended to
symbolize justice, retribution, and understanding. These responses are
GOVERNING EMOTION: HOW TOANALYZE EMOTIONAL POLITICAL…
48
illustrated when a scandal-ridden politician resigns from ofce, when an
investigation is announced following a disaster, or when a politician deliv-
ers a cathartic speech following a crisis. An implication of this feature sug-
gests that policy responses need not burden the target if there are other
positively perceived options. In this book’s case, killing sharks may not be
the only way to alleviate public anxiety following a shark bite incident.
However, preferences for the fastest and most reliable positive relief policy
response may encourage visible punitive instruments.
Thirdly, previously clustered events will have low policy thresholds
in the future because of their connection to dreaded aggregate out-
comes. The fear that a subsequent individual event may represent both
(a) an emotionally intense individual incident and (b) the cue for the
beginning of a new dreaded cluster means that, at the rst sign of the
hazard, responses should take place. When hazard stimuli are present,
they can invoke framings around a historical analogy if the characteris-
tics are seen as representative of that event. As a result, political thresh-
olds are used as a policy tool to prevent future dread aggregation. This
dread prevention is consistent with the evolutionary aspects of
McDermott etal.’s (2008) theory of prospect theory analysis because
under their argument, “even a single negative experience resulting
from encounters with predators or poisoned food may prove essential
for survival” (McDermott etal. 2008, 337).
These elements can be seen in a review of shark bite policy responses in
Table3.1. Eleven locations are reviewed between 1952 and 2011. I exam-
ine the number of shark bites that took place before a policy response, the
number of days between incidents, and the time between the last incident
and the response. Here we see that it is common for two or three bites to
be the trigger for government salience and response. In addition, we see
#
Location CountryYear
Shark bites
before
response
Date of last
incident before
response
Date of
previous
incident
Days
between
incidents
Date of policy
response
(window)
Days between
last incident
and response
Policy Response
7Western Australia Australia 2011 3 (3)22-10-11 10/10/20111022-10-110 Shark hunt
2Sharm El Sheikh Egypt20104 (0)1/12/2010 1/12/20100 3/12/2010 1Shark hunt
10 Hawaii United States 1992 2 (1)26-11-91 19-11-917 28-11-91 2Shark hunt
1PrimoryeRussia20112 (0)18-08-11 17-08-111 22-08-11 4Shark hunt
6SeychellesSeychelles20112 (2) 16-08-11 1/8/2011 15 20-08-11 4Shark hunt
4Reunion Island France 2011 3 (2)19-09-11 16-06-119527-09-118 Shark hunt
8Hong Kong United Kingdom /China 1993 2 (2)12/ 6/1993 1/6/1993 11 29-06-93 17 Exclusion net trial
5RecifeBrazil199411 (2)13-12-94 11/12/19942 6/1/1995 19 Ban on surfing took effect
11 Queensland Australia 1962 4 (2)28-12-61 28-12-610 1962 300Shark net
9DurbanSouth Africa 1952 4 (1)29-11-51 28-11-511 1952 300Shark net
3Dunedin New Zealand19682 (1)25-12-68 15-09-68 101 1/12/1969 300Shark net
Table 3.1 Evaluating the speed of policy responses from the last shark bite
incident
C. L. PEPIN-NEFF
49
that shark hunts are the fastest response option, followed by an exclusion
net trial in Hong Kong and a ban on surng in Recife. It is also often the
case that orders for shark hunts can be given by local or state ofcials
allowing policy entrepreneurs to open and close the policy window at the
same time, since catching and killing a shark often closes the window.
Policy entrePreneurShiP
The impact of individual actors on the policy process, known as policy
entrepreneurs, has been a long-standing issue in political science and pro-
vides an important contribution to this analysis. The denition of policy
entrepreneurs is summarized by Botterill (2013, 99) as elected or unelected
actors who “work to inuence debate by framing issues and developing
solutions to policy problems which they are ready to promote as soon as
an opportunity to do so presents itself.” Policy entrepreneurship involves
those “game changers” and political actors who use their time, resources,
and ideas to impact public perceptions and public policy (Mintrom and
Norman 2009). This includes elected ofcials, the media, and individual
activists. I argue that entrepreneurship requires obtaining the status
needed to inuence or bypass governance structures and compete equally
against other entrepreneurs. An “outsider” activist who handcuffs oneself
to a White House fence for a cause would not be a policy entrepreneur
unless they, their ideas, or coalition is also able to transcend structural limi-
tations to inuence the “insider” debate. Simply put, they must have the
status to be a political player. In addition, policy entrepreneurs use causal
stories to attach their solution to a problem. Stone (2006, 129) argues
that “policy makers also need a persuasive causal story, because problems
come onto the political agenda on the backs of causal stories.” Causal
stories address the narratives that are contested to defend or overturn the
status quo. Problem denition development illustrates the way powerful
stakeholders and opponents use rhetoric and symbols (Stone 1989) to
argue which issues are the problems, what is the cause, who is to blame,
how big is the scope, and what is the solution.
The emergence of an issue may shock one public but not another.
However, if high degrees of emotion and salience align, then these pres-
sures can reach a political “boiling point” that opens policy windows in
which policy entrepreneurs use competing problem denitions and causal
stories to advocate for their solutions. In return, the policy outcomes
offered by entrepreneurs respond to the perceptions of public fear,
GOVERNING EMOTION: HOW TOANALYZE EMOTIONAL POLITICAL…
50
outrage, or disgust toward certain outcomes and their particular fears of
dreaded consequences.
Being positioned in the right job and within the right political system is
essential to using skills or brokering outcomes. The jobs and status of
policy entrepreneurs matter because of the different levels of jurisdiction,
access, and mediation that they allow. “Insider” and “outsider” labels have
been used as well as the study of elected legislators as “proximate”
(Mintrom and Norman 2009) policy entrepreneurs. The job may also
inuence the balance of outcome brokerage. If a politician is the leading
entrepreneur, then they may have readier access to decision-makers and
re-election interests are likely a leading outcome goal. As a result, the level
of access and preference for outcomes that are aligned with the govern-
ment lead to certain types of outcome management, including responding
to the outrage associated with hazards but not the hazards themselves
(Brändström and Kuipers 2003). A political response with “bluster” or
empathy may be more important because reducing the perception of gov-
ernment inaction or the perception of risk is seen as more important than
actual action or risk reduction.
Policy aStheraPy
Policy responses can provide “emotional relief” to these aversive highly
emotional conditions by introducing a positively perceived response to
disaggregate the events and interrupt the negative emotions or by attempt-
ing to pre-emptively stop negative high-emotion aggregations in the rst
place. Linville and Fischer (1991) refer to this within psychology as the
“renewable resources model,” in which positive feedback is introduced to
provide support to individuals or groups who are experiencing temporally
combined negative feedback. They argue that the introduction of positive
emotional stimuli (a speech, law, or action) can break up negative high-
emotion aggregations. In this way, policies provide a therapeutic role in
facilitating a form of positive relief from the negative condition. Policy
threshold arrangements align with this strategy by attempting to pre-
emptively limit or regulate the clustering of dreaded outcomes that lead to
negative high-emotion aggregations in the rst place. This is consistent
with Brändström, Bynander, and t’Hart (2004, 192), who examine crises
and note that “their very unacceptability motivates actors to prevent their
recurrence.” Aggregation prevention measures therefore attempts to dis-
tribute the frequency of temporally combinable aversive states. Examples
C. L. PEPIN-NEFF
51
include policies directed at stopping multiple “shoe-bomb” terrorist
attacks and small rocket re from Palestine. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu noted the need for aggregation prevention as a prolonged
period of time of safety for the Israeli people as the basis for his operation
in the West Bank. He stated, “This operation will only end when quiet and
security is established for the citizens of Israel for a prolonged period”
(SBS 2014). Here we see how the political penalties from these aversive
problem conditions encourage actors to select or tee up quickly adoptable
measures that provide positive emotional relief and potentially reduce the
frequency or clustering of negative events.
ProPoSing anemotion-Policy framework
This chapter continues by providing a conceptual framework to consider
the role of emotionality in policymaking. As Ostrom (1998, 15) notes,
“We need to expand the type of research methods regularly used in politi-
cal science.” This begins with a consideration of policy thresholds. Policy
thresholds are dened as the formal or informal arrangements that facili-
tate the opening of a policy window. Policy windows are simply those
periods of time in which a political process is open to change. This can be
facilitated through different legal standards, discursive cues, social bound-
aries, political rituals, and cultural norms (especially emotional rules and
norms) that govern decision-making equilibrium around individual policy
issues and domains. Different sets of rules apply to different groups and
issues. Douglas (1985, 4) notes how “perception of risks is encoded in
institutions.” This is consistent with Weible (2014), who notes that public
policy should be sure to analyze “the actual rules-in-use that structure the
day-to-day behaviors of actors engaged in situations in a policy process.”
And nally, political penalties are dened as “internal or external pressures
that damage the ability of a political actor to keep their position or impair
their future ambitions” (Neff 2016).
Policy threshold levels are based on the degree of political damage an
individual actor or collective institution is willing to assume for the benet
of inaction. High thresholds are designed to place burdens, including
emotional taxation, on certain groups to keep actors out of the process.
Low thresholds allow policy windows to open to provide actors the oppor-
tunity to calm public distress or anxiety, which I refer to as emotional relief.
The emotion-policy framework assumes that political actors and govern-
ments treat emotions and attention as a public resource to be managed
GOVERNING EMOTION: HOW TOANALYZE EMOTIONAL POLITICAL…
52
and distributed. Under this analysis, issues and events are analyzed across
two main variables: the way emotions facilitate the distribution of penal-
izing conditions and the way governmental actors use tools within a policy
domain to construct thresholds that manage the opening and closing of
policy windows.
Under the emotion-policy framework, political issues are categorized
using a four-square model that plots two variables: degrees of emotion,
noted as high emotion and low emotion, and policy thresholds, noted as
high thresholds and low thresholds (Fig. 3.1). The four categories are
high emotion-low policy threshold (HELP), high emotion-high policy
threshold (HEHP), low emotion-low policy threshold (LELP), and low
emotion-high policy threshold (LEHP). The strength of policy thresholds
differs based on the emotional priority of certain types of issues and the
arrangements of the policy domain. Policy thresholds are designed to limit
or welcome the number of people who can systematically care about an
issue at a given time. Managing time efciently is seen as a key rationale in
Low Policy Threshold
High Policy Threshold
High
EmotionLow
Emotion
High Emotion-Low Policy Threshold
Gays in the military
Car accidents
Abortion
Gun control
Nuclear power
Smoking
Rwanda conflict
Homelessness
Child abductions
Gas price rises
Food contamination
Terrorist attack
School shooting
Shark bite
Music pirating
Prostitution
Political sex scandals
Polygamy
Voter fraud
Climate
Change
Extreme
weather
events
High Emotion-High Policy Threshold
Low Emotion-Low Policy Threshold
Low Emotion-High Policy Threshold
Fig. 3.1 Proposed model of emotion-to-policy threshold levels
C. L. PEPIN-NEFF
53
controlling policy domains, which can function as a primary objective
(Drucker 1985). In this way governments use thresholds to distribute the
emotionality and attention given to an issue that is causing or may cause
political penalties to build.
This analysis begins with a focus on high emotion-low policy threshold
(HELP) issues like shark bite incidents, which are rare or random expected
attention issues that people care about because their occurrence can signal
an instinctual threat or prolonged distress. This category is the chief focus
of this chapter. Highly emotional issues are given intentionally low thresh-
olds that quicken the response process in order to (a) limit the access of
competing actors, (b) provide emotional relief to limit exposure to politi-
cal pressures, and (c) prejudice causal narratives and policy responses.
These issues and events have traditionally weak policy subsystems designed
as such to facilitate quick policy responses, including emotional relief, by
single actors or policy entrepreneurs who are under pressure from political
penalties.
analyzing high emotion-low Policy threShold
iSSueS
Highly emotional issues with weak threshold arrangements are a unique
type of political issue in agenda setting and policy formation. A pattern can
be seen in the way the public mobilizes in different ways around highly
emotional issues and events to put pressures on political actors. Specically,
attention is rationed by government ofcials (Simon 1996) based on the
distribution of penalties. Highly emotional issues and events rise on the
agenda based on presence of an emotional-political-temporal overlap,
where there is an interaction around a problem that matters, to the people
that matter, during a time that matters. This compound problem distrib-
utes penalties relative to the immediacy or sustainability of the penalty and
the strength of the policy domain.
This combination of penalizing factors can be seen in a range of recent
situations. Waldorf (2012, 469) notes that the Kony 2012 video released
via YouTube on 5 March 2012 (Bal etal. 2013) focused attention on the
actions of militia leader Joseph Kony, which “prompted 100 million peo-
ple and prominent US politicians to engage with an issue that had been
crowded off the policy agenda.” The lmmakers accomplished this by
“translating compassion into action” (Waldorf 2012, 471). By April 2012,
GOVERNING EMOTION: HOW TOANALYZE EMOTIONAL POLITICAL…
54
President Obama responded by authorizing 100 Special Operations troops
to assist in the search for Kony (Gettleman 2012). Quick responses to hot-
button policy issues can also be seen in parliamentary systems like Australia.
Tiplady etal. (2013) reviewed government actions in June 2011 following
a television program documenting animal cruelty toward livestock in
Indonesian abattoirs. They surveyed public emotional responses to the
reports and found “pity” for the cattle the most common response
(Tiplady etal. 2013, 876). Within days of the media program running,
160,000 signatures were delivered to the Federal Parliament (Tiplady
etal. 2013, 871) and the government suspended livestock exports by the
end of the week. To isolate the nature of high emotion-low policy thresh-
old cases, a consideration of key characteristics is needed. I propose the
following.
Fast Policy Responses andIntent
First, highly emotional issues are fast. They are prioritized differently in
the agenda-setting process by people and governments. Attention is dis-
tributed differently around negative emotional feelings because these can
come from instinctual or primal sources that produce faster, automatic
responses that prioritize the importance of certain types of issues over oth-
ers (Zajonc 1984; McDermott etal. 2008). This can be seen regarding
threats related to mortality, reproduction, and intentional harm (Decety
and Cacioppo 2012), which trigger extinction prevention responses.
Therefore, it is expected that instinctual high emotion-high salience issues
will have a low tolerance of acceptance in order to continue existing.
Moreover, biologically threatening issues transcend cultural differences
and are more accessible and available than other issues, making their
spread easier. They are more commonly understood and are more likely to
catch on with the public. In addition, understanding threatening issues
provides survival value, which attracts the media and contributes to the
issue’s salience, making these biologically attention-grabbing events more
attractive to news outlets focusing public attention even further and in a
broader way.
High emotion-high policy threshold (HEHP) issues are culturally hot-
button or international topics that people care about and for which the
threshold for opening the policy process is high. These matters are noted
in the upper-left corner of Fig.3.1 and are distinguished based on three
factors. First, they are issues with a high degree of emotion attached to
C. L. PEPIN-NEFF
55
them. Secondly, because of the intensity around them, there are strong
policy subsystems and contested parties that govern their openness.
Thirdly, these prioritized emotional issues encourage policies and struc-
tures that alleviate emotional distress through a prolonged period of pol-
icy stasis, with institutional controls that seek to avoid frequent attention
to the dreaded outcomes. This distributes the political emotionality of the
issue over time and populations, and provides relief to the public because
these issues are perceived as largely settled public policies.
Low emotion-high policy threshold (LEHP) issues are perceived as intrac-
table, with no feasible solution as a way to engender apathy from the
public. In these cases, the dreaded outcomes from the issues do not emo-
tionally resonate with the public and there are high thresholds for policy
action due to the lack of compelling causal stories or feasible solutions.
These are issue areas where the outcome may be severe; however, the lack
of a visible, available, and resonant connection means that even where
policy subsystems are strong, the lack of an issue that matters restricts the
timing of policy opportunities and encourages policy stasis. The lack of
temporal or political availability is reinforced by the emotional relief pro-
vided by attention biases against prioritizing the issues.
Finally, I describe low emotion-low policy threshold (LELP) issues as those
punitive issues which the public may not feel strongly about (such as pri-
vate drug use, immigration, polygamy, voter fraud, and political sex scan-
dals); however, attention to the issue can change the emotional quotient.
This results in a low threshold that encourages policy responses because
they involve negatively constructed or marginalized populations (Schneider
and Ingram 1993). Stoked by context and attention, these issues can rep-
resent moral panics, with policies intended to send a message (Goode and
Ben-Yehuda 1994). Here, there are traditionally weak policy subsystems
that make these issues susceptible to individual leaders.
In all, this framework can help illustrate the way political emotionality
can distribute penalties and the way policy thresholds are used to facilitate
or maintain policy windows as a means of protecting actors from vulnera-
ble situations. The emotion-policy threshold shows that these two inci-
dents fall into different categories, HELP and HEHP in large measure,
because the emotionality of the situations did not distribute penalties to all
actors; the higher threshold in the US was maintained due to penalties
imposed by gun-rights advocates. In addition, there are a number of key
differences that contributed to varying distributions of the penalties within
the policy domains.
GOVERNING EMOTION: HOW TOANALYZE EMOTIONAL POLITICAL…
56
Finally, it is important to note the way pressures from these aversive
problem conditions encourage vulnerable actors (i.e. politicians function-
ing as policy entrepreneurs) to select quickly adoptable measures that pro-
vide policy as therapy. Looking at the policy process in this manner helps
illustrate the role of mitigating emotional political situations, which has
implications for broader policy analysis. In short, utilizing this framework,
you would not expect similar events to have the same speed and type of
policy response unless they had similar sensibilities, distributions of penal-
ties, and common perceptions of positive policy solutions.
The emotion-policy threshold framework is a heuristic to assist in ana-
lyzing how policy arrangements are designed to distribute emotionality in
ways that protect political actors during vulnerable periods of time. Or put
another way, this framework looks at how those in power keep power in
the face of politically dangerous environments. There are a number of
implications for policy analysis from this proposal.
Policy domains create higher thresholds by requiring multiple levels of
authority to open the policy process and implement policy responses.
High-policy thresholds are used to insulate politically costly issues, either
because they are emotional issues that reect cultural divides or because
solving the problem is too politically difcult. Response time plays a key
role here, as lower policy thresholds with fewer actors are designed to be
faster than high thresholds with more actors. Lower thresholds rely on
weak political resistance structures, with concentrated power among a lim-
ited number of actors. These low thresholds are designed to provide polit-
ical benet by addressing certain distressing situations or punishing
relegated groups. Importantly, the opening of the policy window is
designed to control the process by quickly inserting a policy response that
is intended to mitigate the emotionality, attentive focus, and political pen-
alty, thereby closing the window and the process. Differences in perceived
penalties may inform differences in policy responses and policy
thresholds.
Looking at policy analysis from this perspective makes it possible to
critique politicians and the policy process more completely. The emotion-
policy threshold framework highlights the role of political penalties and
vulnerabilities that may contribute to certain policy actions or inactions. I
argue that elected actors are often aware of the potential political penalties
that will undermine their position and establish threshold arrangements
for specic issues based on expected penalty repertoires. The policy entre-
preneur then is not simply the actor who champions a bill or an idea but
C. L. PEPIN-NEFF
57
the person most vulnerable to the political penalty. In addition, the policy
window is not about opening the political process but about closing the
process. Under this analysis, the solution to the problem is to interrupt
public emotion, salience, and penalties. Identifying these variables in pol-
icy analysis means that policy responses to relieve public anxiety, mass pro-
tests, leadership tensions, or other threats to political survival can be
judged on these bases. This also allows for the discussion and consider-
ation of alternatives that accomplish the same goal.
A discussion of political emotionality in policymaking allows for a
greater critique of emotional taxation, placebo politics, policy as therapy,
and seemingly knee-jerk responses. The focus on thresholds and ways to
control the policy process by opening policy windows provides a way to
critique political strategies that induce crises and low thresholds as a gov-
erning strategy. This research highlights how emotions help facilitate or
extinguish social mobilizations. Political organizing can extinguish itself
on the basis of political emotionality and randomness. It becomes difcult
to organize between periods of highly emotional events and sustain orga-
nizing around socially averse and emotionally taxing (Pepin-Neff and
Caporale 2018) situations.
In all, this analysis suggests the potential for manipulation of the politi-
cal system that requires further study. Indeed, the focus on some of the
emotionality around issues can be constructed in an illusory manner by
governments, the media, or other political actors, making the issue public
perception. It also lends itself to periods of crisis-induced policymaking to
control the process, can ignore the underlying problem (thus, making it
worse), mislead the public, and direct resources against a false target.
concluSion
I have proposed an emotion-policy threshold framework to analyze the
way governments establish policy thresholds and institutional arrange-
ments given relative degrees of emotionality, salience, and political vulner-
ability. The political arena is an emotional ecosystem with patterns and
cycles. In this environment, affect-laden political issues can present a
threat to powerful actors and encourage the design of institutions and nar-
ratives to pre-emptively protect against intense responses to predictable or
expected emotional events. This chapter has taken a theoretical position to
suggest how governments attempt to govern emotion. Policy thresholds
play a key role in this process, since political actors have established formal
GOVERNING EMOTION: HOW TOANALYZE EMOTIONAL POLITICAL…
58
sets of laws, informal norms, and political rituals to diffuse emotional
issues in the policy process. Political actors establish thresholds for issues
to try and avoid the circumstances under which people care a lot about an
issue, how many people care, and for how long. This is done by changing
the type and speed of policy responses. As a result, policy thresholds are
designed to be high or low based, in part, on the emotional sensitivity of
the issue and the penalties decision-makers face from the public.
I now turn to the three case studies in Florida, Cape Town, and Australia
that provide tangible examples of emotionality, salience, policy entrepre-
neurship, and policy thresholds. Each one is reviewed to see the way aws
play into each story, with sharks portrayed as the enemy, shark bites
referred to as intentional shark attacks, and responses seemingly respon-
sive to public safety needs.
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C. L. Pepin-Neff, Flaws,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10976-9_4
CHAPTER 4
A Political Frenzy During Florida’s Summer
oftheShark
IntroductIon
This chapter examines why the US state of Florida adopted a policy ban-
ning ecotourism shark feeding dives along its coast during what the Time
magazine called the 2001 “Summer of the Shark.” To begin, ecotourism
shark feeding is dened as “the practice of feeding sharks to attract num-
bers of animals to divers during the course of head boat dive tours” (State
of Florida. Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission 2000a, 2).
The statutory regulation in question is described below and was voted
on by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (otherwise
known as the FWC) on 6 September 2001. The FWC was formed in 1999
and is made up of seven commissioners, who are appointed to ve-year
terms by the Governor, in this case Republican John Ellis “Jeb” Bush, and
conrmed by the state Senate.
This new rule was labeled 68B-5.005 “Divers: Fish Feeding Prohibited;
Prohibition of Fish Feeding for Hire; Denitions” and came into effect on
1 January 2002. It states:
1. No diver shall engage in the practice of sh feeding.
2. No person shall operate any vessel for hire for the purpose of carrying
passengers to any site in the saltwaters of the state to engage in sh feed-
ing or to allow such passengers to observe sh feeding.
64
3. For purposes of this rule:
(a) “Diver” means any person who is wholly or partially submerged in the
water, and is equipped with a face mask, face mask and snorkel, or
underwater breathing apparatus.
(b)