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

Sanchayan Banerjee,Manu Savani,Ganga Shreedhar

doi:10.30636/jbpa.42.220

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.

Highlights

This article reviews the literature studying the public support for ‘soft’ versus ‘hard’ behaviour change policies, and what factors drive such preferences
We provide the first literature review of contemporary interdisciplinary research on public support for hard versus soft policy instruments
We identify three promising avenues for future research to unpack what drives people’s preferences for hard versus soft public policies (Table 2): first, probing how and when individual-level versus contextual factors matter; second, how preferences for hard versus soft policies evolve over time; and third, if and when there is policy preference spillovers within and between policy domains, including the role of shocks like COVID-19

Summary

Introduction

This article reviews the literature studying the public support for ‘soft’ versus ‘hard’ behaviour change policies, and what factors drive such preferences. Policy instruments can be understood on a spectrum of increasing government intrusiveness, as visualised in the Nuffield Intervention Ladder for public health policies (Nuffield, 2007). In this framework, policy measures range from “doing nothing”, to providing information for the public, to guiding people’s choices first through behavioural interventions and financial incentives, up to the highest levels of intervention which restrict and eliminate personal choices.”. Conventional soft policies include ‘moral suasion’ (Romans, 1966) and educational campaigns, such as ‘fact-based’ health warnings, which focus on providing information to alter behaviours Other behavioural public policy instruments that sit on the ‘soft’ end of the spectrum include ‘nudge pluses’ (Banerjee and John, 2020), ‘boosts’ (Hertwig and Grüne-Yanoff, 2017) and ‘thinks’ (John and Stoker, 2019)

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