The Emotional Constitution of Welfare: A Multi-Level Framework for Social-Affective Citizenship

The "emotional turn" in the social sciences has highlighted deficiencies in rationalist models of citizenship, yet the institutional analysis of social policy remains largely disconnected from the study of political affect. Existing frameworks struggle to systematically integrate the formal and informal spheres of welfare provision with the lived emotional experiences of belonging and recognition. This article introduces the Social-Affective Citizenship (SAC) framework, a theoretical synthesis that posits the mutual constitution of the social and the affective domains. We develop expanded conceptualizations of Social Citizenship (the Ecosystem Matrix) and Affective Citizenship (Four Dimensions) by integrating insights on informality, hybrid governance, affective regulation, and the politics of hope. The SAC framework is presented as a four-level dynamic process model, tracing the pathway from the ecosystem of provision, through mechanisms of mediation and affective experience, to political feedback. Furthermore, we demonstrate how this architecture is operationalized by a suite of analytical tools developed in preceding work, which provide the necessary diagnostics, microfoundations, and macro-dynamics. A worked example traces a conditional activation regime through all four levels, illustrating how the framework illuminates both progressive trajectories grounded in recognition and regressive ones such as welfare chauvinism. The article concludes by establishing a rigorous, multi-level research program for analyzing the emotional constitution of welfare.