Consultations are thought to increase the legitimacy of policies. However, this reasoning only holds if stakeholders really participate in the consultations. Current scholarship offers three explanations for participation patterns: Institutional rules, policy characteristics, and interest group resources determine participation. This article argues that additionally the linguistic complexity of consultation documents influences participation. Complex language deters potential participants, because it raises the costs of participation. A quantitative analysis of the German consultation of electricity grids lends credibility to the argument: If the description of a power line is simplified between two consultation rounds, the number of contributions mentioning that power line increases. This result contributes to our understanding of unequal participation patterns, and the institutional design of participatory procedures. If we think that legitimacy is enhanced by broad participation, then language of the documents matters.

In public consultations, policymakers give stakeholders access to the policymaking process in exchange for technical or political information. Our article proposes to analyze not only the policy positions, but the emotional content of consultation contributions. In our descriptive study, we explore two conjectures: First, citizens contributions to public consultations display more emotions than contributions by corporate actors, and second, contributions mentioning concrete policies display more emotions than contributions referring to the abstract policy framework. We use dictionary-based sentiment coding to analyze ~ 7300 contributions to the consultation of German electricity grid construction planning. Our analysis shows that citizens’ contributions contain more emotional terms, especially voicing fear. Moreover, if contributions refer to a specific power line, they contain less joy, but more fear and sadness. Thus, we show a way to conceptualize and measure the link between public policies and the emotions they trigger.