The aim of this paper is to describe and analyse the processes and content of two recent quality evaluation reforms and to discuss how shifts and continuities can be understood with a particular focus on the role by affective governing and emotions in these processes. We want to explore if and in that case how policy processes preceding quality assurance reforms (‘governing evaluation’) are reflected in the enacted quality evaluation processes (‘governing by evaluation’), by focusing on the moves, intentions and emotions underlying two recent quality assurance reforms in Swedish Higher Education. Our analysis show an interdependence between the characteristics of the policy process and the actual design and (pre)fabrication of the enacted quality assurance evaluation framework. This paper draws attention to how certain modes and processes of governing, manifested in the emotional politics of policymaking, correspondingly also permeate the actual policy and argue that these findings empirically illustrate how ‘affective atmospheres’ in processes of ‘governing evaluation’ are reflected in the actual ‘governing by evaluation’.