Why a nudge is not enough: A social identity critique of governance by stealth

Policy makers can use four different modes of governance: ‘hierarchy’, ‘markets’, ‘networks’ and ‘persuasion’. In this article, it is argued that ‘nudging’ represents a distinct (fifth) mode of governance. The effectiveness of nudging as a means of bringing about lasting behaviour change is questioned and it is argued that evidence for its success ignores the facts that many successful nudges are not in fact nudges; that there are instances when nudges backfire; and that there may be ethical concerns associated with nudges. Instead, and in contrast to nudging, behaviour change is more likely to be enduring where it involves social identity change and norm internalisation. The article concludes by urging public policy scholars to engage with the social identity literature on ‘social influence’, and the idea that those promoting lasting behaviour change need to engage with people not as individual cognitive misers, but as members of groups whose norms they internalise and enact.     

Learning Contested Lessons: Participation Equity and Electric Utility Regulation

Electric utilities have typically enjoyed a close and cooperative relationship with the state regulatory bodies that oversee them. In 2001, the Colorado Public Utilities Commission mandated that the largest Colorado utility build a wind power plant as part of its conventional generating capacity, despite the utility's vigorous objections. Local environmental groups, intervening in a form of rule making called Integrated Resource Planning, succeeded in overturning regulatory capture. This paper explains this anomalous case and highlights the role of knowledge and learning in the outcome. The case shows the opportunities and limitations of using contested technical knowledge to push for institutional learning. The case also suggests the importance of repeated policy processes. Wind energy advocates perceived that they had acquired participation equity, ownership in the process akin to Kingdon's “softening up,” which led policy makers to take their arguments more seriously, opening up the possibility of institutional learning.     

The interstate compact on the placement of children:Reduction In Delays

Juvenile and family courts have witnessed a sharp increase in the number and complexity of dependency cases involving the interstate placement of abused or neglected children. A new provision of the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children (ICPC) is designed to speed interstate placement decisions and case processing. The authors review the history, present status, and efforts to improve the ICPC to better serve children and their families.     

Local Government Structure and Public Expenditures

The ``Law of 1/n'' postulates a positive relationship betweenthe number of democratically electedrepresentative districts and governmentspending. Strong support for thisrelationship exists in legislatures in theUnited States (at both the state andnational level) and across countries. Fewstudies have examined this relationship atthe local level despite the fact that localgovernments operate under constraintssimilar to those faced by representativelegislatures. Using a sample of Georgiacounties we find the number of countycommissioners to be positively correlatedwith county government expenditures,indicating support for the Law of 1/nat the local level.     

The Price of Nostalgia: Menzies, the "Liberal" Tradition and Australian Foreign Policy

This article surveys some of the key contributions to the secondary literature on Australia's foreign and defence policy during Robert Gordon Menzies' two prime ministerships (1939–41, 1949–66), and seeks to identify Menzies' place in a "Liberal" and Liberal Party tradition through a reading of this work. Via a study of Menzies' imperialism, British race patriotism, nationalism, and attitudes towards Asia and the United States of America, it argues that the prime minister stands in an ambiguous relationship to the transformation that occurred in Australia's international orientation between the 1930s and 1960s. In the 1950s the Australian government's cold war foreign policy, and the political language that Menzies used in private and public to articulate it, were largely successful in balancing the competing claims of Britishness, Australianness and the newly-formed "American Alliance". By the early 1960s, however, his nostalgia for a dissolving imperial order was sufficiently pronounced that it contributed powerfully to a symbolic and rhetorical defeat for his side of politics, allowing Labor to claim the mantle of Australian foreign policy modernity.