Collective Empathy in Politics and Public Policy: Toward a Scaffolding Framework

Empathy is invoked as a response to conflict and social fragmentation, yet political and public policy research has largely treated it as an individual or interpersonal phenomenon. This article develops a process-oriented account of collective empathy as a socially and politically mediated phenomenon through which empathy towards others becomes collectively shared, publicly reinforced, institutionally mediated, and politically consequential. We propose a scaffolding framework comprising three interacting mechanisms: bottom-up activation and aggregation,  horizontal diffusion, and top-down legitimation. We argue that the configuration and interaction of these mechanisms shape the durability of collective empathy: mutual reinforcement facilitates stabilization, whereas limited reinforcement or conflict among these mechanisms produces episodic or fragmented trajectories. Structured empirical illustrations from refugee politics, post-conflict reconciliation, and the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrate the framework’s empirical plausibility. The framework explains why intense empathic responses may remain temporary while more modest orientations can become durable through communicative and institutional reinforcement.