Behavioural Insights Teams (BITs) and Policy Change: An Exploration of Impact, Location, and Temporality of Policy Advice

• Author: Ishani Mukherjee,Sarah Giest
• DOI: 10.1177/0095399720918315
• Published date: 01 November 2020
• Date: 01 November 2020
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0095399720918315

Administration & Society

2020, Vol. 52(10) 1538 –1561

© The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/0095399720918315

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Article

Behavioural Insights

Teams (BITs) and Policy

Change: An Exploration

of Impact, Location, and

Temporality of Policy

Advice

Ishani Mukherjee1 and Sarah Giest2

Abstract

Behavioural Insights Teams (BITs) have gained prominence in government as

policy advisors and are increasingly linked to the way policy instruments are

designed. Despite the rise of BITs as unique knowledge brokers mediating

the use of behavioral insights for policymaking, they remain underexplored

in the growing literature on policy advice and advisory systems. The article

emphasizes that the visible impact that BITs have on the content of policy

instruments, the level of political support they garner and their structural

diversity in different political departments, all set them apart from typical

policy brokers in policy advisory systems connecting the science–policy

divide.

Keywords

Behavioural Insights Teams, behavioral insights, policy advice, policy change,

policy design

1Singapore Management University, Singapore

2Leiden University, The Hague, The Netherlands

Corresponding Author:

Ishani Mukherjee, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, School of Social Sciences, Singapore

Management University, 90 Stamford Road, Level 4, Singapore 178903.

Email: ishanim@smu.edu.sg

918315AASXXX10.1177/0095399720918315Administration & SocietyMukherjee and Giest

research-article2020

Mukherjee and Giest 1539

Introduction

The literature on the use of behavioral insights in public policy has expanded

over the past five years and presents a variety of perspectives on the long-

standing phenomenon of using psychological findings to help achieve public

policy goals (Van Deun et al., 2018). Ongoing research in the field involves

examining the organizational manifestation of nudging in the form of

Behavioural Insights Teams (BITs, n.d.) in government, as well as treating the

use of behavioral insights as an informal addition or enhancement to tradi-

tional tools of government action. In this article, we aim to connect these

streams of research by explicitly addressing the contribution of BITs toward

shaping policy instruments based on behavioral insights. The application of

behavioral insights to policymaking depends on the interpretations of scien-

tific findings and the assumptions used in translating empirical evidence on

human decision-making (Kuehnhanss, 2019). Thereby, responsible govern-

ment departments require the capacity to effectively integrate behavioral

knowledge into their functions, a task that has been taken up by the role of

BITs (Howlett, 2015; Wu et al., 2015).

In this context, we identify BITs as catalysts for integrating behavioral

insights into policy design processes. Here, questions also arise about how

BITs try to modify prevailing policy instruments by changing existing poli-

cies to gain support from other stakeholders. The literature in recent years has

highlighted the complexity of installing BITs in government, emphasizing

their distinctive success in promoting behavioral ideas beyond traditional

advisory roles (Strassheim, 2020). BITs inhabit a unique position within gov-

ernments’ broader policy advisory systems, as these groups start out as inter-

nal advisory units but can grow to become external partners that galvanize

the creation of more behaviorally informed policies, across sectors and often

across jurisdictions. There have been attempts to classify their role in govern-

ment by identifying them as “knowledge brokers” (Feitsma, 2018). However,

the degree of their impact can vary widely and rests heavily on the tendency

of BITs to capture politically feasible opportunities for bringing about policy

change. BITs can thus become largely independent units that take on knowl-

edge broker functions by bridging behavioral research and policymaking,

while also acting as enterprising policy actors that seize opportunities to

insert and legitimize new behaviorally based ideas into the policymaking

process. BITs can set themselves apart in promoting evidence-based policy

advice by employing specific methods such as randomized controlled trials

(RCTs), analyzing the results and designing local interventions that are ready

for government uptake (Halpern, 2015). The influence of BITs along both of

these activities can be critical to the way and extent to which the content of

policy instruments is modified based on behavioral insights.