Individual autonomy and public deliberation in behavioral public policy

The most successful concept in behavioral public policy (BPP) is nudging, which involves altering choice architecture to leverage people’s biases and heuristics to promote welfare-improving behaviors. However, in recent years, nudging has faced criticism. This article addresses a specific critique: while nudges may enhance welfare, they often fail to promote autonomy. Several authors have raised this concern, yet there is no unified definition of autonomy in BPP. This article delves into the various meanings of autonomy in the BPP literature: freedom of choice, agency, and self-constitution. It focuses on autonomy as self-constitution, which acknowledges instrumental rationality but also considers substantive rationality, i.e., people’s ability to reason about their goals, aspirations, and identities. The article explores epistemic, normative, and psychological challenges of autonomy as self-constitution and suggests that public deliberation in mini-publics could mitigate some of these challenges. Moreover, it emphasizes that an autonomy-centric BPP should shift its focus from reframing individual choice situations (i-frame interventions) to enabling public deliberation about institutional choices (s-frame interventions).