Below are some speaking notes for a talk I gave at the workshop "Administrative Burden Workshop: A Decade of Progress, The Path Ahead" organised by Don Moynihan and Martin Baekgaard held in NUI Galway on August 10th and 11th 2023. This is not a transcript of the talk which was interactive and included slides from various ongoing projects.
1. Firstly, there are clearly many antecedents for connecting behavioural economics literature with administrative processes, not least the work of Herbert Simon and several scholars throughout the second half of the twentieth century. The work on American Institutionalists, German Cameralists, and at least some of the more policy-oriented economic psychology literature. Having said that, it is clear that there was a turning away from administrative processes in a lot of mainstream economics and psychology and cognate fields. It is not something that had a major presence in the top Departments and journals coming into the 21st century.
2. The work of Sunstein and Thaler very squarely put behavioural processes in government and organisations back into the limelight. Obviously, the book Nudge was a particularly important presence and fed directly into the political process and create a number of interesting feedback loops.
3. The integration of behavioural science into public policy is going through an interesting period of experiencing both rapid integration and epistemological crises simultaneously. These are in a sense related as things that were once restricted to academic seminar rooms become core features of public policy undergo a greater degree of public scrutiny and contestation.
4. One common critique of the type of behavioural public policy that emerged in the wake of Nudge is that it led to a focus on individual influences. This is currently being hammered out in a number of papers and responses. I don't think it is a particularly fair critique - it might be fairer to say that the literature tends to focus on single-issues that are analytically and empirically tractable. Many of the key applications though are clearly in the domain of administrative processes, with areas like pension autoenrolment being for example widely studied.
5. The extent to which the behavioural literature focused on administrative process led people like Thaler and Sunstein to attempt to reorient the whole enterprise in this direction, and they began using the phrase Sludge to get at the idea that many features of policy and consumer markets create barriers to enacting preferences.
6. In some cases, there are heavy overlaps between the type of work emerging from the concept of Sludge and the work that colleagues here including Moynihan and Herd have conducted on administrative burdens. I think though it is not fair to think of this as putting old wine in new bottles, rather better to think of it as new whiskeys coming from blending different ones together. There is a lot of recurrence in emphasis in these literatures.
7. There are many other echoes between literature on behavioural economics, economics of well-being, and evolving administrative burden work. Many economists have been working on the development and use of evaluation frameworks that incorporate well-being measures, something that is also echoed in the administrative burden literature. There are also very clear overlaps in how different fields are trying to conceptualise heterogeneity in response to administrative change. The continuing evolution of broad behavioural journals such as Nature Human Behaviour, Behavioual Public Policy, Journal of Behavioural Public Administration, is one fascinating development in bringing many of these communities together.
8. Some interesting areas for discussion include i) the nature of the emerging field of behavioural public administration ii) lessons and debates across disciplines related to causal impact analysis, utility measurement, heterogeneity analysis iii) emerging ethical and legitimacy issues in the scaling of behavioural-informed administrative design.
References
Arulsamy, K., & Delaney, L. (2022). The impact of automatic enrolment on the mental health gap in pension participation: evidence from the UK. Journal of Health Economics 2022; 86: 102673.
Christensen, Julian, Donald P. Moynihan, Pamela Herd, Lene Aarøe, and Martin Baekgaard (2020). Human Capital and Administrative Burden: The Role of Cognitive Resources in Citizen-State Interactions. Public Administration Review 80(1): 127-136
Dynarski, Susan, CJ Libassi, Katherine Michelmore, and Stephanie Owen. 2021. "Closing the Gap: The Effect of Reducing Complexity and Uncertainty in College Pricing on the Choices of Low-Income Students." American Economic Review, 111 (6): 1721-56.
Herd, P., & Moynihan, D. P. (2018). Administrative Burden: Policymaking by Other Means. Russell Sage Foundation.
Sunstein, C. R. (2021). Sludge: What Stops Us from Getting Things Done and What to Do about It. MIT Press.
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