The international appeal of behavioural public policy: is nudge an Anglo-American phenomenon?

Abstract

Since the publication of Nudge by Thaler and Sunstein (2008) behavioural public policies and nudge units have been widely adopted right across the world, which has resulted in many improvements to the delivery of public policies, such as better tax collection, increased access of young people to education opportunities, and more charitable giving. This paper asks what explains the adoption of nudge units and related initiatives. In particular, are Anglo–American or West European countries the focus for adoption? Are these interventions more likely to appear under left, right, or centre-dominated governments? Ascertaining the origins of nudge can adjudicate the extent to which nudge is partial project, based on the dominance of liberal economies and the preferred programme for centre governments and/or right political ideologies, or whether it has more universal appeal. Using data from OECD and OECD-partner countries, event history models reveal Anglo–American countries to be the drivers, with nudge not favoured by left-controlled governments. Nonetheless, with the interest and level of policy transfer not abating, in future years nudge is likely to appear in a wide variety of contexts, including China.

Keywords:

• Behavioural public policy
• nudge
• diffusion

Notes

Acknowledgements

The first draft of this paper, based on early findings, was presented at the workshop on governance, Zhejiang University, 8–10 October 2018. I thank the funders of the workshop and its participants for a fruitful intellectual gathering. I am grateful to Jie Tan and Damien Bol for their advice on the statistical analysis. I also thank the reviewer and editor of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Jones et al., Changing Behaviours; OECD, “Behavioural Insights and Public Policy”; Balzo, Nudging in the UK, in the USA, in Denmark, in Italy; Feitsma, “Brokering Behaviour Change”; John, How Far to Nudge?; Thaler, Misbehaving.

2 Nudge.

3 John, How Far to Nudge?

4 Thaler, Misbehaving; Lewis, The Undoing Project.

5 See note 3 above

6 Halpern, Inside the Nudge Unit.

7 John, “Policy Entrepreneurship in UK Central Government,” 257–267.

8 Sunstein, Simpler.

9 See note 3 above.

10 OECD, “Behavioural Insights and Public Policy.”

11 Jones et al., Changing Behaviours.

12 Leggett, “The Politics of Behaviour Change,” 3–19.

13 Whitehead et al., Neuroliberalism.

14 Hay, “The Normalizing Role of Rationalist Assumptions in the Institutional Embedding of Neoliberalism,” 500–527.

15 See note 11 above.

16 John et al., The Use of Descriptive Norms in Public Administration.

17 See note 14 above.

18 Beech, Neoliberalism, New Labour, and the Welfare State.

19 Lewis, The Undoing Project.

20 See note 3 above

21 Thaler, Misbehaving.

22 John and Richardson, “Nudging Citizens towards Localism?”

23 How Far to Nudge?

24 Castles, “The Dynamics of Policy Change,” 491–513.

25 Peters, “Policy Transfers between Governments,” 71–88; Pollitt and Bouckaert, Public Management Reform.

26 For a discussion of the relationship between populism and nudge see the newly-written epilogue in John et al., Nudge, Nudge, Think, Think.

27 John, “Behavioural Science, Randomized Evaluations and the Transformation of Public Policy.”

28 World Development Report 2015.

29 Stone, Capturing the Political Imagination.

30 Dolowitz and Marsh, “Learning from Abroad,” 5–23; Stone, “Transfer Agents and Global Networks in the ‘Transnationalization’ of Policy,” 545–566.

31 Shipan and Volden, “The Mechanisms of Policy Diffusion,” 840–857.

32 Sabatier, Policy Change And Learning; Moyson et al., “Policy Learning and Policy Change,” 161–177; Dunlop et al., Learning in Public Policy.

33 Dunlop, “Policy Learning and Policy Failure,” 3–18.

34 Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations.

35 Rose, “What Is Lesson-Drawing,” 3–30.

36 Radaelli, “Policy Transfer in the European Union,” 25–43; Dunlop and Radaelli, “Policy Learning in the Eurozone Crisis,” 107–124.

37 Walker, “The Diffusion of Innovations among the American States,” 880–899.

38 e.g. Berry and Berry, “State Lottery Adoptions as Policy Innovations,” 395–415; Mintrom and Vergari, “Policy Networks and Innovation Diffusion,” 126cy N.

39 e.g. Cao, “Networks as Channels of Policy Diffusion,” 823–854.

40 Gilardi, “Four Ways We Can Improve Policy Diffusion Research,” 8ur; Ward and John, “Competitive Learning in Yardstick Competition,” 3–25; Plümper and Neumayer, “Model Specification in the Analysis of Spatial Dependence,” 418–442.

41 Maggetti and Gilardi, “Problems (and Solutions) in the Measurement of Policy Diffusion Mechanisms,” 87blem.

42 Feitsma, “Brokering Behaviour Change.”

43 See note 10 above.

44 OECD, “Government at a Glance 2017,” 168.

45 Sounsa et al., “Behavioural Insights Applied to Policy - European Report 2016.”

46 Halpern and Sanders, “Nudging by Government,” 52–65; Balzo, Nudging in the UK, in the USA, in Denmark, in Italy. Afif, ‘“Nudge Units”—Where They Came from and What They Can Do’, Let’s Talk Development, 25 October 2017. http://blogs.worldbank.org/developmenttalk/nudge-units-where-they-came-and-what-they-can-do.

47 Armingeon and Careja, Comparative Data Set for 28 Post-Communist Countries, 1989–2007.

48 Yamaguchi, Event History Analysis; Allison, Event History and Survival Analysis.

49 Cox, “Regression Models and Life-Tables,” 187–202; O’Quigley, Proportional Hazards Regression.

50 The dataset and commands to produce the results may be obtained by contacting the author directly.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peter John

Peter John is Professor of Public Policy in the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London. He is known for his work on agenda-setting, local politics, behavioural interventions, and randomized controlled trials. He is the author of Analyzing Public Policy (2012), which reviews the main theories of public policy and the policy process. He is interested in how best to involve citizens in public policy and management, often deploying behavioural interventions. He tests many of these interventions with randomized controlled trials. Some of these trials appeared in Nudge, Nudge, Think, Think: Experimenting with Ways to Change Civic Behaviour (Bloomsbury, 2011). Practical issues with the design of experiments are covered in Field Experiments in Political Science and Public Policy (Routledge, 2017). Experiments are also used to examine the impact of social media and politics in Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action (Princeton University Press, 2015), with Helen Margetts, Scott Hale and Taha Yasseri. A more general approach to the use of the tools of government to achieve policy change is contained in his Making Policy Work (Routledge, 2011). His most recent book is How Far to Nudge: Assessing Behavioural Public Policy (Edward Elgar, 2018).