A ‘Behavioural Insights’ movement has emerged within governments. This movement infuses policymaking with behavioural scientific insights into the rationally bounded nature of human behaviour, hoping to make more effective and cost-efficient policies without being too obtrusive. Alongside sustained admirations of some, others see in Behavioural Insights the threatening revival of technocracy, and more particularly a ‘psychocracy’: a mode of public decision-making that wrongfully reduces the world of policymaking to a rational-instrumental and top-down affair dictated by psychological expertise. This article argues, however, that the claims of technocracy and psychocracy are overgeneralizations, emanating from a frontstage-focused debate that ignores a vast backwater of emerging behavioural policy practices. Grounded in four case studies on behavioural policymaking in Dutch governance, it will be demonstrated that at least part of this backwater is neither so technocratic nor so psychocratic as the critics claim.

A behavioural insights community has emerged within a growing number of governments. While this community helps to make policies more behavioural science based, its frontstage role models tend to assume a straightforward, instrumental and apolitical view of the science-policy relationship that seems unrealistic. This article therefore examines what goes on backstage in this community, based on an ethnographic study of behaviour experts in Dutch central government. The article argues that their work consists of a complex palette of practices (that is, choice architecture; analysis; capacity building). Because these practices resemble typical knowledge brokerage work, the article pushes for an envisaging of 'behaviour experts as knowledge brokers'. key words nudge • knowledge brokers • Dutch government • ethnographic research

In this paper, we critically review three assumptions that govern the debate on the legitimacy of nudging interventions as a policy instrument: (1) nudges may violate autonomous decision-making; (2) nudges lend themselves to easy implementation in public policy; and (3) nudges are a simple and effective mean for steering individual choice in the right direction. Our analysis reveals that none of these assumptions are supported by recent studies entailing unique insights into nudging from three disciplinary outlooks: ethics, public administration and psychology. We find that nudges are less of a threat to autonomous choice than critics sometimes claim, making them ethically more legitimate than often assumed. Nonetheless, because their effectiveness is critically dependent on boundary conditions, their implementation is far from easy. The findings of this analysis thus suggest new opportunities for identifying when and for whom nudge interventions are preferable to more conventional public policy arrangements.

A behavioural public policy movement has flourished within the global policy realm. While this movement has been deemed interdisciplinary, incorporating behavioural science theories and methods in a neoclassical economics-governed policy process, this paper analyses the bounded form of interdisciplinarity that characterizes it. We claim that an engagement is missing with the broader sweep of social sciences, which share similar concerns but deploy different analytical perspectives from those of behavioural public policy. Focusing on two central concepts (context and evidence), we aim to show how behavioural public policy's bounded interdisciplinarity implies constrained understandings of context and evidence, thereby limiting its complex problem-solving abilities. At the same time, we highlight some alternative examples of behavioural public policy practice that do explore new critical interdisciplinary horizons.

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