Public support for ‘soft’ versus ‘hard’ public policies: Review of the evidence

Abstract

This article reviews the literature on public support for ‘soft’ versus ‘hard’ policy instruments for behaviour change, and the factors that drive such preferences. Soft policies typically include ‘moral suasion’ and educational campaigns, and more recently behavioural public policy approaches like nudges. Hard policy instruments, such as laws and taxes, restrict choices and alter financial incentives. In contrast to the public support evidenced for hard policy instruments during COVID-19, prior academic literature pointed to support for softer policy instruments. We investigate and synthesise the evidence on when people prefer one type of policy instrument over another. Drawing on multi-disciplinary evidence, we identify perceived effectiveness, trust, personal experience and self-interest as important determinants of policy instrument preferences, along with broader factors including the choice and country context. We further identify various gaps in our understanding that informs and organise a future research agenda around three themes. Specifically, we propose new directions for research on what drives public support for hard versus soft behavioural public policies, highlighting the value of investigating the role of individual versus contextual factors (especially the role of behavioural biases); how preferences evolve over time; and whether and how preferences spillovers across different policy domains.

Public managers’ trust in citizens and their preferences for behavioral policy instruments: evidence from a mixed-methods study

“…The results of our ROL regression indicated that public managers are relatively willing to use behavioral policy instruments, particularly in comparison to the use of financial and material incentives. These results confirm earlier studies on the relative acceptance of the use of behavioral policy instruments (Reisch & Sunstein, 2016;Sunstein et al, 2018Sunstein et al, , 2019Banerjee et al, 2021), but now from the perspective of senior public managers. Behavioral policy instruments are relatively low cost (Benartzi et al, 2017) and can be used to pursue policy objective without the political costs of additional regulations, bans and oversight.…”

“…Second, we assessed public managers' support for the use of behavioral policy instruments, but in relation to other relevant policy instruments. This way, we go beyond the standard binary questions (yes/no: support/no support) and offer a more ecologically valid and realistic measure of individual preferences and opinions about the use of behavioral policy instruments (Gideon, 2012;Davidai & Shafir, 2020;Banerjee et al, 2021). Third, we identified several factors informing administrative support for the use of behavioral policy instruments.…”

“…Based on whether policy instruments direct or encourage people's appropriate behaviors, sticks, carrots, sermons and nudges can be divided into "hard" and "soft" policy instruments (Hood, 2007;Banerjee et al, 2021). The "hard" policy instruments are those that direct people's behavior through formulated rules and directives, and through financial incentives such as fines, taxes and subsidies.…”

“…On the other hand, "soft" policy instruments are those that seek to steer people's behavior by providing additional information or by altering the information environment in which people make choices. These "soft" policy instruments include sermons and, by extensions, nudges (Diepeveen et al, 2013;Banerjee et al, 2021). Several studies already examined public support for these soft policy instruments (Aghion et al, 2010;Oliver & Ubel, 2014;Pitlik & Kouba, 2015;Sunstein et al, 2018;Banerjee et al, 2021), but no such study has been conducted on public managers' support for these instruments (but see Veselý & Petrúšek, 2021).…”

Revisiting Our Assumptions About the Nature of Man

“…al., 2010; and it is therefore reasonable to expect that genetics affects administrative phenomena at least through its effects on the political sphere. First, as the BPA literature is also concerned with studying what makes citizens accept different types of policies (Banerjee, Savani, & Shreedhar, 2021) and support government programs (Nicholson-Crotty, Miller, & Keiser, 2021) it may be fruitful to incorporate BG methods to strengthen the explanatory models of policy approval within BPA. Secondly, bureaucracies are naturally politically governed institutions, and the effects of political decisions will invariably spill over into the implementation phases thereby affecting classic BPA phenomena.…”