This chapter brings the insights from the various empirical sections together, and draws out the implications for policy-makers. It makes the case for more experiments that can help us understand what drives citizen behaviour and assess the best way governments can intervene. With robust evidence to hand, governments can achieve better policy outcomes. The chapter advocates a local and decentralized approach to citizen involvement and behaviour change that reflects how the researchers applied the experimental method and the way they used partnerships with local interest groups and public bodies to develop a genuinely creative and evidence-based form of local policy-making. In this way, the book argues that the leverage of nudge and the creative potential of think can be brought together.

The idea of deliberation is well established as a think strategy. But can it deal with controversial issues of public policy in an online environment? This chapter reviews the literature on this subject and reports a unique experiment in large-scale online deliberation involving 6,000 citizens. Drawing on evidence from these online debates on community cohesion and youth anti-social behaviour, it shows how online engagement can influence knowledge and opinions about public policy options.

This chapter begins by showing the limitations of traditional means of influencing citizen behaviour, using the example of a failed attempt to encourage the inhabitants of a housing estate to increase their recycling. It then proceeds to introduce the idea of ‘nudge’ and ‘think’ strategies. These ‘softer’ forms of intervention involve working more closely with citizens, understanding how they think, and encouraging them to make better decisions. Nudge – a concept pioneered by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler – is about framing choices and using social cues to help citizens decide what to do. Think constitutes a broad set of tools, stretching from consultation to handing over decisions to citizens. This chapter argues for the efficacy of these approaches, which will be explored and tested in depth throughout the following chapters.

Written specially for the second edition, this epilogue reviews the field since the book first came out in 2011 and assesses the future of nudge and think in light of subsequent developments in public policy. There has been a fast-moving agenda for nudge, which has gone from being the newcomer to an established policy tool. But it has also been an important time for think, which has matured as a form of governance. This chapter asks whether recent developments have followed the first edition’s recommendation for nudge and think to work more closely together. It also proposes a modified version of nudge, ‘nudge plus’, which incorporates elements of think and takes forward the vision of a decentralized, citizen-active form of nudging argued for in the first edition.

This chapter asks how it is possible to determine what works. Policy-makers need to know whether the nudge and think measures they introduce can achieve their desired effects or not. It seems obvious to say that policy should be based on sound research, but in reality governments and public agencies often intervene without good evidence. This chapter argues that policy-makers and others should adopt an experimental approach when they do not know how to achieve their goals. It introduces the randomized controlled trial and its qualitative cousin, the design experiment, which provide robust methods for ascertaining whether interventions designed to change citizen behaviour work or not.

This chapter discusses an experiment on donating organs. It asks whether the nudge strategy of changing choice architecture can encourage people to agree to donate their organs after their death. It then outlines a second experiment testing whether a booklet alone or a booklet combined with a discussion (a think strategy) would cause people to be more willing to donate their organs. In this experiment, the elements of think and nudge were tested together.

This chapter shows how experiments can test a variety of strategies for mobilizing the vote in a Get Out the Vote campaign. There is a vast literature on getting citizens to engage politically, but could nudge offer some additional insights? This chapter reports on an experimental intervention about getting citizens to vote and reflects on its implications for stimulating citizen behaviour more generally.

This chapter asks if a nudge, through creating social pressure to do something, can encourage people to follow through their good intention to give to charity. A web of complex and overlapping issues can impact on what might encourage people to give to charitable causes or to help others. We can learn much about what leads to altruism from economics and psychology research. The experimenters asked people to pledge a book donation from their home to help children in South Africa. They then investigated whether households who were advised their donation would be made public were more likely to give because their generosity would be advertised to their peers.

This chapter is about how to encourage household recycling of waste. It presents a detailed case of a nudge strategy that involved canvassing people on their doorsteps, encouraging them to recycle their waste and comparing the results with a randomized controlled trial. The findings show the strength of nudge, in that the canvassing increased recycling, but they also show the potential weakness, as the effect diminished three months later. The chapter also contains a second experiment that examined the role of feedback in encouraging recycling. It concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for the advocates of the nudge strategy.

This chapter reviews the evidence on promoting volunteering and asks what a nudge strategy can offer. It contains details on a design experiment that asked citizens complaining to a local authority telephone call centre to undertake civic-minded activity. What do these findings indicate about the challenge of promoting volunteering? By changing the choice architecture, is it possible to turn complainers into volunteers?