2 - Advancing behavioural public policies: in pursuit of a more comprehensive concept

Summary

Introduction

Behavioural public policy (BPP) has been suggested as a new policy paradigm to utilise behavioural insights, that is, evidence-based expertise on human behaviour, for policy making. So far, behavioural policies are predominantly based on insights from behavioural economics and psychology in order to ‘nudge’ people to act in line with predefined aims and to overcome the dilemma of behaviour that contradicts economic rationality and is in conflict with desired policy ends. However, behavioural insights are ‘embedded in several historical trajectories and contexts rather than converged into one pattern’ (Strassheim and Beck, 2019: 5). Thus, the term refers by no means exclusively to people’s bounded rationality (Simon, 1991), even if it is this context which BPP is mostly associated with. Instead, we advocate to conceptualise BPP as a multi-disciplinary and multi-methodological policy concept that utilises insights from the whole range of behavioural research for plural purposes throughout the policy process.

Against this backdrop, this chapter makes a contribution to the theory of BPP by investigating the abundance of behavioural and social sciences, as well as pluralistic methods and research findings that effectively lay the ground for our ‘advanced BPP’ – a concept that is much broader in terms of applied disciplines and methods than its predecessor. In line with the introduction to this themed issue (Ewert et al, 2020), advanced BPP moves considerably beyond nudge politics and those behavioural interventions that exclusively focus on the micro level of policy making. Hence, we attempt to identify conceptual voids with regard to different fields of social sciences as a grounding for future behavioural policies. Based on a wider disciplinary and methodological foundation, we seek to further the conceptual shaping of behavioural policy making which is still very likely to be equated with a top-down roll-out of behaviour change policies (Jones et al, 2013), notwithstanding some efforts to extend its meaning and application forms (see for example, Gopalan and Pirog, 2017). Furthermore, current BPP mostly tends to perceive people’s behaviour as being isolated from social, cultural and environmental conditions that surround ‘the “doers” of behaviour’ (Spotswood and Marsh, 2016: 286). In contrast to any kind of activity that, speaking in Granovetter’s (1985: 483) terms, is embedded in and constituted by people’s various social relations, behavioural policy makers seem to be inclined to an ‘undersocialised conception of human action’.