IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ehl/lserod/126042.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

How 'nudge' happened: the political economy of nudging in the UK

Author

Listed:
  • Mills, Stuart
  • Whittle, Richard

Abstract

The UK Behavioural Insights Team transformed nudging and behavioural economics from nascent ideas to key policy tools for the UK Coalition Government. This article argues that political economic circumstances significantly contributed to the success of this ‘nudge’ programme. The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) created a ‘contest of authority’ over dominant policy approaches. By framing the crisis as a crisis of rationality, behavioural perspectives gained political support. The GFC also saw that the UK Government (from 2010) adopt a programme of fiscal austerity. Nudging complemented this programme by suggesting effective policy could be made cheaply. Using various accounts of nudging in the UK from those involved in its development, we demonstrate the role of the country’s political economy in the behavioural turn. We conclude by reflecting on the role of behavioural insights today, given a political–economic landscape much changed since 2010.

Suggested Citation

  • Mills, Stuart & Whittle, Richard, 2024. "How 'nudge' happened: the political economy of nudging in the UK," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 126042, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    • Handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:126042
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/126042/
    File Function: Open access version.
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    austerity; behavioural economics; nudge; political economy;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D90 - Microeconomics - - Micro-Based Behavioral Economics - - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:126042. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: LSERO Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/lsepsuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.