While recognising that the private domain of individual decision-making is driven by multifarious desires that ought to be respected, I argue in this chapter that public sectors are each driven by a limited number of collectively agreed-upon objectives, with these objectives – e.g. health, literacy – being in some sense primary (i.e. foundational, if people are to have a reasonable opportunity of fulfilling their private desires). Given that public sector objectives are collectively agreed upon a priori, respect for autonomy can be to some extent relaxed in this domain. With this, and given that the complexity of many public sector services lends scope for egoistically inclined suppliers to exploit market failures and the behavioural influences for their own interests, I contend that demand-led competitive markets in the public sector ought to be disallowed. Instead, I propose that providers and users be given direct incentives to reciprocate, by, for example, instituting reputational competition between service suppliers.

I begin with the origins of reciprocity, since this motivational force takes a central position in my political economy of behavioural public policy. The behavioural influences that tend to be labelled as errors by most behavioural economists, and as such have served as the justification for a paternalistic direction in behavioural public policy, in an ecological sense may not be errors at all. We thus cannot conclude that attempts to modify people’s choices in accordance with these so-called errors will improve the lives of those targeted for behaviour change. Where people are imposing no substantive harms on others, policy makers should restrict themselves to protecting and fostering reciprocity, which benefits the group and most of the people who comprise it, irrespective of their own personal desires in life. However, when one party to an exchange uses the behavioural affects to benefit themselves but imposes harms on the other party, the concept of a free and fair reciprocal exchange has been violated. I thus argue that there is an intellectual justification to introduce behavioural-informed regulations against activities that impose unacceptable harms on others.

Academics and policy makers in several countries have been advocating for measures of utility and happiness to replace income as indicators of development, and the paternalism that has dominated behavioural public policy to date is justified in that people often fail to choose in accordance with their own well-being. Yet the notion of utility has a somewhat confused history, meaning different things to different people at different times. Hume, for instance, aligned utility with public usefulness, Bentham with pleasure and pain, and Mill and modern welfare economists with pretty much anything. A possible reason why there are many different meanings attached to the concept of utility is because many people, much of the time, are not driven to maximise utility at all. That is, the pursuit of utility does not drive desires, but rather desires are antecedent. Moreover, desires are multifarious and vary across people. The policy maker’s role over the private realm of individual decision-making should not therefore be to strive to maximise utility, but rather to put in place conditions that facilitate people in the pursuit of their own conception of a desired life.

This book is the third of a trilogy of books that I wrote on the past, present and my preferred conception of the future of the field of behavioural public policy. The first book was titled ’The Origins of Behavioural Public Policy’, and the second ’Reciprocity and the Art of Behavioural Public Policy’. This Introduction summarises the content of those two books to remind the reader where I have got to in the trilogy, and then briefly details some of the main arguments in the current book, to signpost to the reader where I am about to go.

This chapter concludes the book. In it, I summarise the principal arguments I made in all of the other chapters, before offering some final words as food for thought. Ultimately, I conclude that there are two arms to my political economy of behavioural public policy. The first arm is for policy makers to allow people a great deal of individual autonomy, while at the same time shaping the general institutional environment so as to nurture people’s almost intrinsic desire to cooperate and reciprocate with others. The second arm recognises that some people will act on their selfish, egoistic inclinitations when afforded a great deal of freedom, and thus in those circumstances where people implicitly or explicitly use the behavioural influences to serve themselves and to harm others, the policy maker has an intellectual justification to intervene in their actions and behaviours.

To serve as reference comparators to the political economy of behavioural public policy that I will present in the rest of the book, I will review the principal alternative (partial) frameworks that have been introduced into the field of behavioural public policy. I present the conceptual requirements of the most influential approach to date - i.e. libertarian paternalism, applications of which are known as nudges. I move on to several of the alternative frameworks that have been developed to meet major criticisms that have been waged against nudges - namely coercive paternalism (or shove policy), and the nudge-plus and boost strategies. All of these approaches aim at correcting perceived behavioural limitations on the demand side. I then introduce a framework that instead attempts to tackle the egoistic exploitation of the behavioural influences from the supply side - i.e. behavioural regulation, or the so-called budge approach. However, since budges are one of the two main arms of my political economy of behavioural public policy, a large part of a whole chapter (Chapter 9) is devoted to them, and thus their consideration in this chapter is quite brief.

In this chapter, I argue that there is no role for manipulative or coercive government paternalism over the private domain of decision-making. Followers of the liberal economic tradition contend that the competitive market is the best means by which to foster social cooperation. However, I maintain that we cannot ignore the fact that the competitive market harbours significant incentives for egoism, particularly in the provision of goods and services that are associated with market failures and where there is scope to exploit the behavioural influences. That said, private decisions that impose unacceptable externalities can be regulated against if needs be, and importantly, in the realm of private decision-making, where people ought to be free to pursue their desires – which includes entering competition with others if they so wish – the need to protect autonomy outweighs the arguments to disallow the competitive market. Moreover, the competitive market offers a means to protect people from poor goods and services by there being alternative suppliers. However, I note once again that governments do have a role to play in nurturing the reciprocal instincts.

In this chapter, I challenge the confidence that has been placed in hard and, in particular, soft paternalistic measures in the field of behavioural public policy. I consider the four limitations that have been proposed to human reasoning – i.e. limited imagination, willpower, objectivity and technical ability – but ultimately conclude that these are insufficient justification for paternalistic intervention, for two principal related reasons. First, it is impossible for a policy maker to discern what people desire in their own lives, and second, so long as they are not harming others, people should be free to pursue their own desires. The vision for the future of behavioural public policy that I propose here is thus consistent with classical liberal, and in particular, Millian thought: i.e. aim to educate people on the pros and cons of their actions and inactions so that they are better equipped to live the lives they wish to lead, but do not interfere directly in guiding them towards any particular end.

Nicholas Carnes continues the focus on media and information, examining how local newspapers cover incumbents and challengers. Some voters may value information about the pre-election employment history of candidates, for instance, if voters believe Congress would benefit from members with a range of socioeconomic classes and work experiences. What do the media actually say about employment histories? Carnes examines the coverage of 32thirty-two House incumbents and their challengers running for reelection in 2006 (or their most recent contested election), selected to oversample those with a working- class background prior to taking office. Content analysis reveals that occupational backgrounds rarely receive much coverage. The backgrounds of challengers are more newsworthy, but overall coverage of this aspect remains modest. Instead, coverage near elections focuses on incumbent party, issue positions, and performance in office. This lack of information about class background is arguably problematic for descriptive representation, particularly if it would shape voter choices were it more frequently provided.

In Chapter 8, Gregory Huber and Patrick Tucker provide a critical overview of the role of media in informing citizens about candidates. They identify important developments in the media landscape, including the decline in local print media, the expansion of national newspapers and cable TV into local markets, and the growth of the Internet. The chapter begins by discussing the theoretical relationship between these developments and the nature of coverage of politics, focusing on how this shapes the incentives of both incumbents and individuals running for office. Then turning to a review of prior empirical work, the authors highlighting areas where we currently lack a solid empirical foundation, for example, local television coverage and more recent newspaper coverage. Finally, they propose an agenda for a unified cross-media data collection project on citizens’ political informational environments vis-à-vis Congress.