Behavioral Public Policy and the Monopoly of Nudging

The objective of this chapter is to map behavioral public policy interventions by clarifying that these include other tools besides nudges. To achieve this, a systematic review of definitions for both “nudging” and “behavioral public policy” in academic literature is complemented by a systematic analysis of definitions of the same concepts mentioned in newspaper articles. A descriptive approach is adopted to investigate the prevalence of nudging in behavioral public policy. Results indicate that, whereas the majority of scholars—particularly among those engaged in theoretical work—correctly treat nudging as a subset of behavioral public policy, a tendency exists to use the two concepts interchangeably and to overly focus on nudging at the expense of a broader perspective on behavioral public policy. A taxonomy of behavioral techniques is then proposed based on three categories: nudging-informed policy techniques, behaviorally informed traditional regulatory tools, and citizens-empowering behavioral techniques.