Policy Design in the Digital Age: Instruments, Actors and Spaces

Digital information technologies have inspired interest in a range of new or previously under-exploited policy instruments, including big data, open data, crowdsourcing, gamification, ‘nudge’ and A/B testing. Proponents argue that these digital era policy instruments will ensure policies are less subject to random chance, cognitive limitations and partisan bias, achieving the policy designer’s ‘dream’ as advanced by early design thinking. At the same time, these analyses ignore key insights from subsequent developments in the policy design literature—specifically, the ways in which policy design varies across policy problems, design spaces and in light of instrument mixes. Recognizing this omission, this paper brings insight from the policy design literature to bear on digital era policy instruments, while also exploring how these instruments may refresh theories of policy design. The paper first establishes a classification scheme into which digital era policy instruments can be organized, considering the actors they involve, the characteristics of the technologies and data on which they rest, and the stage of the policy process to which they can be applied. Next, the paper probes the contextual challenges unique to digital era policy instruments, and reappraises existing notions of policy mixes that may include digital era instruments only or combinations of ‘old’ and ‘new’ instruments. Finally, the paper sets out propositions to be tested in subsequent research with a view to producing an empirically grounded theory of digital era policy design that accounts for variation across policy problems, policy design spaces, and instrument mixes.