The Consumer as the Great Unknown: How Do Policymakers Address Their Targets?”

Policymakers regularly address the individual: in consumer policy, health policy, climate policy, environmental policy, traffic policy to name some examples. By addressing the individual, policymakers seek to reach specific aims that ultimately require compliant behaviour. Or vice versa: In his or her role as a consumer the citizen/individual often influences issues that are in the focus of policy-makers. We could easily imagine different fields of policy-making where individuals (= policy targets) as consumers (in a broader sense) do not comply with the targeted policy so that the chosen policy instrument is not effective. This leads to the question how policy-makers deal with noncompliance and how this is related to the choice of policy instruments and especially behavioural instruments. The addressee of policy instruments has to be conceptualized as a multidimensional actor. The paper presents a concept of the addressee that assumes the actor to be multidimensional: Consumer behaviour can be influenced or follow reason and rationality, but it can also be influenced by social embeddedness, cooperation, learning, imitation, (mis-)calculation, spontaneous reactions, lethargy, emotions. The list of categories is (so far) not final but will be developed in the paper. This conceptual idea of policy addressees, however, is not discussed (yet) in political or social science literature on policymaking. To fill this gap this the paper will present a newly developed concept in order to better understand addressees` behaviour and bring it together with the discussion about behavioural policy-making (Loer 2018 (forthcoming)). Behavioural sciences consider that not only one specific behaviour impacts decision-making but that it is the interaction of different behavioural dimensions which makes a difference. Howlett suggests to conceptualize different kinds of ‘willingness’ as far as the traditional instruments are concerned (Howlett 2016). The paper proceeds to propose different varieties of behaviour that have to do with rational processes and conscious and wilful decision-making processes and with subconscious spheres of human behaviour the way they are analysed by behavioural scientists. The systematic analysis of human behaviour will add a multitude of such dimensions. The new concept of the multidimensional actor presented in the paper will therefore be based on a meta-study which considers research on consumer behaviour from different disciplines. In a second step the paper will test this new concept empirically. Empirical examples of policies are analysed that require compliant behaviour. The paper will analyse policies focusing on NCD-prevention (non-communicable diseases). Empirical data with regard to these policies (reports, legislation, expert interviews) from three countries (USA, UK and Denmark) is analysed to answer the following questions: What are the underlying assumptions regarding the addressee (target) when it comes to such policies in health promotion and disease prevention that are focussed on lifestyles? How do policymakers consider behaviour of individual citizens (as a consumer) who sometimes even know about risk factors that (might) cause non-communicable diseases (such as diabetes, coronary heart diseases etc.) but nevertheless follow unhealthy lifestyles? The paper will give some outlook on other fields of policy-making that require compliant behaviour such as environmental/climate policy.