Shifting Attention, Shifting Support : Experimental Evidence on Crowding Out Between Individual and Systemic Policies

Sammanfattning

This study aims to investigate whether limited attention to opportunity costs in policy evaluation can explain crowding out between different policy approaches. In the last two decades, the field of behavioral public policy has studied how behavioral insights could be utilized in policy to account for bounded rationality and “nudge” people toward better decisions without limiting their freedom of choice – thereby offering cheaper and less intrusive alternatives to traditional policy. However, after evidence from implementation and research has shown moderate results, some behavioral scientists now argue that directing focus to these individually framed policies can crowd out systemic changes (such as taxes and regulations), which could have more effectively addressed the issue at hand. This has, in turn, raised concerns for an unjust shift of responsibility – from governments and companies to individuals. To investigate the empirical support for crowding out in individuals’ evaluation of policy, we utilize opportunity cost reminders to redirect attention to foregone policy options. We conduct an online experiment with 1,582 US participants and measure how support for different individually and systemically framed climate policies changes when respondents are presented with reminders containing examples from the opposing policy frame. The results show both evidence of opportunity cost neglect and that systemic policies receive greater support than individual policies. We also observe an interaction effect: When systemic policies are presented as an opportunity cost of individual policies, support for the individual policies decreases, whereas when the conditions are reversed, support remains unaffected. This difference in effect from an opportunity cost reminder suggests that attention to individual policies can crowd out systemic policies that could otherwise have been favored.