What factors explain the success of the UK Cabinet Office’s Behavioural Insights Team (BIT)? To answer this question, this paper applies insights from organizational theory, particularly accounts of change agents. Change agents are able — with senior sponsorship — to foster innovation by...

A bibliographical essay about the history of field experiments in political science, reviewing the origins of the method, detailing important examples of experiments and outlining their current fields of application. The piece concludes with a reflection on the special characteristics of...

Recent years have seen a growth in the use of social norm messages by local and national governments. These messages have been primarily used to induce desired behaviours among the non-compliant minority by pointing to the compliance of the majority. As well as being of considerable theoretical...

IRandomised controlled trials have a number of advantages for policy-makers in testing out interventions and improving standard administrative procedures. The use of a more robust form of evidence can challenge old ways of doing business and can lead to the redesign of existing administrative...

Loss aversion is one of the foundational phenomena in behavioural economics and behavioural science. It is also one of the most widely replicated in basic science studies, and one which has found a regular use in behavioural public administration. It is therefore a natural choice for...

How effective are systems of transparency, such as Freedom of Information (FOI) requests? The ambitious aims of FOI hinge on the extent to which requests produce the desired information for the citizen or group. The question is whether such legally mandated requests work better than the more...

This paper sets out the political and organisational context for the adoption of behaviour change polices, noting how nudge ideas take their place within the standard operating procedures of bureaucracies and in the public arena of debate and advocacy. It suggests that accounts of the emergence...

The paper reviews the use of randomised controlled trials in public policy. It explains the method, indicates where they work best, gives examples, and indicates the state of play for trials in the current policy environment

Objective: This study investigates whether asking people to make a pledge causes them to donate to a charitable cause and whether the promise of public recognition increases the effectiveness of the request.Methods: A randomized controlled trial in Manchester, UK where households were sent...

The toolbox of governments increasingly resembles a set of information cues and prompts whereby public actors use their authority to define messages to be received by various publics and organisational actors. Citizens and other targets of government policy, such as organisations and interest...