Alice Moseley

• PhD
• Associate Professor at University of Exeter

Promoting agency – people's ability to form intentions and to act on them freely – must become a primary objective for Behavioural Public Policy (BPP). Contemporary BPPs do not directly pursue this objective, which is problematic for many reasons. From an ethical perspective, goals like personal autonomy and individual freedom cannot be realised wi...

First published as a special issue of the Policy and Politics journal, this book situates reforms known as 'nudges' or 'behavioural interventions' which have emerged in public policy and administration within a broader tradition of methodological individualism.

Research adopting an interdisciplinary, behavioural perspective on Public Policy and Public Administration is booming. Yet there has been little integration into mainstream public policy scholarship. Behavioural public administration (BPA) and behavioural public policy (BPP) have emerged largely as two disconnected subfields. We propose the overarc...

It has been argued that a ‘new climate politics’ has emerged in recent years, in the wake of global climate change protest movements. One part of the new climate politics entails experimentation with citizen-centric input into policy development, via mechanisms of deliberative democracy such as citizens’ assemblies. Yet relatively little is known a...

This article theorises how behavioural public administration can help improve our understanding of frontline policy implementation. The human factors that characterise policy implementation remain undertheorised: individual variation in policy implementation is dismissed as mere "noise" that hinders predictability in policy implementation. This art...

This paper discusses both challenges and opportunities for using inquiry-based learning in public administration postgraduate education in a context of internationalisation. In particular, we discuss the appropriateness of inquiry-based learning for teaching diverse groups of students from varied international backgrounds. Inquiry-based learning ha...

Endorsement is used by charitable organizations to stimulate public support, including monetary donations. This article reports a field experiment that examined the effect of leader and peer endorsement on student volunteering. The experiment was conducted with over 100,000 students from five UK universities and compared the effect on volunteering...

Interventions aimed at increasing the supply and representativeness of elected officials range from facilitative to the formally authorised. This paper reports on a field experiment aimed at testing the effect of facilitative approaches at the local level based on a collaboration between parish councils and the research team. We randomly allocated...

Research indicates that providing social information about other people’s charitable donations can increase individual contributions. However, the effects of social information on volunteering time are underexplored. In this field experiment, we measure the effects of different levels of feedback about other people’s time contributions (very high,...

Interest in experimental research in public management is on the rise, yet the field still lacks a broad understanding of its role in producing substantive findings and theoretical advances. Written by a team of leading international researchers, this book sets out the advantages of experiments in public management and showcases their rapidly devel...

There are a number of influences on how long an agency head serves. The importance of particular influences in turn depends on the prospective destination of the agency head: elsewhere in the public sector; the private sector; or retirement. We estimate survival models of agency heads’ tenure using panel data on British central government executive...

There is growing interest within public management in using governance tools to influence citizens’ behaviour, including changing ‘choice architecture’ by manipulating defaults. This paper reports a survey experiment with 4005 British adults which examined the impact of different defaults on people's propensity to visit, and register on, the organ...

This article provides advice on how to meet the practical challenges of experimental methods within public management research. We focus on lab, field, and survey experiments. For each of these types of experiments we outline the major challenges and limitations encountered when implementing experiments in practice and discuss tips, standards, and...

This article extends the theory of government agency survival from separation of powers to parliamentary government systems. It evaluates expectations of increased risk to agencies following transitions in government, prime minister or departmental minister, and from incongruence between the originally establishing and currently overseeing politica...

We evaluate a theory of the effects of publishing performance information on citizens' collective voice to local providers about public service performance and the perceptions and attitudes that influence their voice. Field experiments show that information about low absolute and relative performance of local government household waste recycling se...

We extend the theory of government agency survival from separation of powers to parliamentary government systems. We suggest that agencies are at increased risk following a transition in government, prime minister, or departmental minister and in cases where the actors in the political executive overseeing an agency are different to those establish...

New insights from psychology and behavioural economics have encouraged a paradigm shift in policy debates towards a focus on ‘Nudge’ strategies that are influenced by an understanding of the cognitive, social and even moral factors driving human decision making. In areas such as environmental policy Nudging holds considerable potential as a tool of...

Griffiths, Kippin and Stoker bring together many of the country’s leading academic and policy experts to explore the long-term challenges facing public services, and ask what the role of government, citizens and society should be in addressing them. The book sets out a new reform agenda, exploring possibilities for the future design and delivery of...

One of the mechanisms through which the United Kingdom government is seeking to achieve its Big Society agenda is through nudge-style interventions. This article summarises research findings from nudge experiments, which aimed to increase civic participation, and discusses implications for the voluntary and public sectors. Nudging has modest impact...

The landscape of the UK public sector is densely populated with semi-autonomous agencies. A recent review counted 1148 semi-autonomous public bodies connected to UK central government or the devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (Farrugia and O’Connell 2008). The bodies are of different formal institutional types and incl...

Research indicates that both doorstep canvassing and postal appeals can be effective in encouraging people to vote although less is known about whether mobilization increases engagement with public services. We compare the effect of two different methods of mobilization – doorstep canvassing and leaflets – on family attendance at early childhood ‘S...

In recent years welfare services in Western Europe have been criticized for poor coordination. In response, ‘seamlessness’ has emerged as a vision for public administration with ‘one-stop shops' viewed as means to reach this. This article conceptualizes the one-stop shop and presents a three country case study to examine its drivers and its adaptat...

How can governments persuade citizens to act in socially beneficial ways? Thaler and Sunstein's book Nudge drew on work from behavioural economics to claim that citizens might be encouraged through 'light touch interventions' (i.e.nudges) to take action. In this ground-breaking successor to Nudge, Peter John and his colleagues argue that an alterna...

Understanding what motivates people and what drives their behaviour is self-evidently central to policy making. If you are trying to change human society for the better then you are likely to have some theory of what it is that makes humans "tick". Social science in its theoretical work also looks to discover microfoundations: the individual-level...

while there is broad support for the principle of organ donation in the UK, only around 25% of citizens are registered donors and there has been recent debate over how to increase this figure. The proposed studies will simulate contrasting public policy interventions aimed at encouraging organ donor registration, comparing the effectiveness of ‘nud...

ABSTRACT AimTo explore the acceptability amongst general practitioners (GPs) of an early intervention to prevent long-term sickness absence from work and to identify the appropriate broad characteristics of such a service.BackgroundThe effect of long-term sickness absence from work on individuals and society has been the subject of recent policy de...

Joined-up government is often viewed as a remedy for coordination problems arising in the complex multi-organisational terrain of contemporary public services. Governments extol the virtues of formal coordination mechanisms as tools of joined-up government, both locally and centrally. Such policy exhortations conceive of joined-up government from a...

Much of the discussion of state steering of service delivery networks to encourage collaboration at the local level has been theoretical. This study builds on this analysis systematically to assess the relationship between meta-governance tools of central government steering and the extent of local collaboration, using the case of homelessness serv...

Scallywags is a community‐based, early intervention programme for young children (aged 3–7) with behavioural, emotional and social problems, which integrates work in the home and school with a parenting curriculum and direct work with children. A pre‐post intervention study across multi‐sites of 340 participants is reported. Using standardised meas...

English Despite growing awareness of and enthusiasm for evidence-based practice (EBP) among front-line social care staff employed by member agencies of the Centre for Evidence-based Social Services, using evidence in practice is a demanding task. This article highlights some of the challenges to evidence-based practice experienced by those involved...

This paper argues that staff in the caring professions wishing to use research evidence to inform their practice cannot afford to ignore the Internet, since it is far and away the best means of access to evidence there is. It also provides a description of and rationale for evidence-based practice, and highlights the benefits of the Internet using...

Joined-up government is often viewed as a remedy for coordination problems arising in the complex multi-organisational terrain of contemporary public services. Governments extol the virtues of formal coordination mechanisms as tools of joined-up government, both locally and centrally. Such policy exhortations conceive of joined-up government from a...

There has been a lot of conceptual work setting out various forms of vertical and horizontal mechanism for coordinating organisations that provide public services. However, most empirical work has focused either on case studies or general characterisations, particularly noting the importance of networks as well as traditional hierarchical forms of...

Multi-agency collaboration is often advocated as a means of tackling cross-cutting areas of public services and viewed as a solution to service fragmentation, with local agencies on the receiving end of government exhortations to collaborate. Yet there is relatively little research examining the effectiveness of policy tools and mechanisms aiming t...