Public acceptability is an essential condition for the successful implementation of needed reforms. Policymakers cannot build a strong case for reform on technical grounds alone. Reforms must also reflect citizens’ views on issues and responses to policy measures, if they are to receive the public support needed to sustain them over time. Recent changes affecting the political economy of reform have further reinforced the importance of public acceptability. Citizens increasingly demand the right to participate in the policymaking process and the advent of social media has dramatically changed the scope and nature of public debate. Moreover, evidence suggests that individuals’ perceptions and attitudes play an increasing role in explaining policy preferences. For example, the gap between those who believe inequality is high and those who believe it is low has risen in many OECD countries over the past decades. However, around 90% of the dispersion in views reflects differences within groups – i.e. between people who share the same socio-economic characteristics. In this context, policymakers cannot simply target well-defined groups when seeking to build effective coalitions for reform, they need to understand what views people hold and how these views are shaped by perceptions and attitudes.
Better use of available perceptual and behavioural data can help ensure that public acceptability becomes an integral part of the reform process. Recent methodological advances have shed valuable new light on the “demand-side” of reform. Drawing on survey-based and experimental methods, governments and international organisations have strengthened their capacity to measure and analyse key perceptions, attitudes and preferences in areas including tax and redistributive policies, environmental policies and social policies. These subjective data have the potential to complement traditional statistical indicators and existing policy tools, such as distributional impact assessments, in a way that can improve reforms. Recognising the relevance of these data, the OECD established an interdisciplinary Expert Group on New Measures of the Public Acceptability of Reforms. Its objective consisted in taking stock of the growing body of evidence and exploring how its insights can be harnessed to provide more effective guidance on the public acceptability and political feasibility of necessary reforms.
This report explores two questions based on the Expert Group’s findings and relevant OECD work:
1. How effective are our analytical frameworks for drawing policy-relevant insights on public acceptability from the available data and indicators? This question is treated in a specific but particularly significant case, that of inequality-reducing policies (Chapter 1).
2. What policy tools and frameworks can help better integrate considerations of public acceptability into the reform process? This question is treated more broadly across policy areas (Chapter 2).
First, the Expert Group argued that a more realistic analytical framework can help explain people’s policy preferences relating to inequality and design reforms that better reflect them. There are strong methodological and practical reasons why policy can benefit from an improved analytical framework:
Extension of the scope of analysis: Standard economic models have worked relatively well for explaining the narrower and more tractable case of income inequality and preferences for redistributive policies. However, they are less well suited for analysing other important forms of inequality, such as inequality of opportunity, inequality between groups and discrimination.
Introduction of key elements into the analysis: Greater psychological realism can help (i) better describe the process through which policy preferences are formed, what are the key subjective factors and how they interact; (ii) capture the important role played by contextual and country-specific elements in shaping people’s views about inequality; and (iii) interpret persistent cross-country differences in support for inequality-reducing policies.
The report proposes a new framework for analysing the public acceptability of inequality-reducing policies (see Figure 1.9 for a visual representation). This framework identifies three main types of subjective factors that determine people’s views about inequality and support for policies: (i) their beliefs about inequality; (ii) their attitudes towards policies and government; and (iii) their attitudes towards others and society. In doing so, it notably highlights the importance of taking account of the different principles people use to evaluate the fairness of policies and of the perceived impact of policies on key groups, which does not always align with actual impacts. Furthermore, the report conducts a preliminary review of possible indicators to “populate” the framework and establishes priority areas for measurement. Its recommendations include the proposal for an OECD Perceptions Database to help collect and harmonise relevant available data, with the aim of complementing existing OECD datasets by giving due weight to key subjective factors that help determine the public’s response to proposed reforms.
Second, the report outlines a new instrument to support policymakers – the Public Acceptability Tool (PAT). The Expert Group called for the development of a “policy compass” that can help assess the extent to which a proposed reform is aligned with public views and guide choices on how to design, communicate and implement it in a way that is more likely to receive broad public support.
The PAT is composed of a general framework that articulates four main dimensions that matter for public acceptability across reform areas (see Figure 2.9 for a visual representation).
Economic Dimension and Fairness Dimension: Economic and distributional impacts are key dimensions through which people assess the outcomes of reform. However, the way in which the public perceives these impacts and evaluates their effect on the status quo may differ significantly from that of policymakers. By highlighting possible gaps, the PAT can provide a clearer picture ex-ante of how likely a proposed reform is to be accepted based on its expected outcomes.
Behavioural Dimensions of Social Change: Reforms involve broader processes of social change: they require individuals to adjust their behaviour in order to achieve a desired aggregate outcome. By taking due account of behavioural responses, the PAT can provide clearer and more realistic recommendations on how individuals should be accompanied through the process of social change implied by reform.
Process Dimension: Procedural elements also play a distinct role in determining the public acceptability of reforms. Through this dimension, the PAT aims to capture the sense of legitimacy that a given reform can draw, or not, from the institutional and political processes used to design, implement and justify it.
The relative importance of these dimensions varies depending on the specific policy area, the national context and the characteristics of the reform itself, but all are relevant for understanding public acceptability across policy areas. The framework is designed to help policymakers keep track of the main determinants of public acceptability, map the possible interactions between them, and identify key data and tools.
The PAT also includes a set of complementary tools which can help adapt and tailor the general framework to specific reform areas and contexts to ensure that it is relevant and operational:
A “reformer’s checklist” to ensure considerations of public acceptability are integrated systematically into the reform process and effective use is made of existing data;
Sectoral roadmaps for reform to specify the relative importance of different dimensions and possible interactions between them in given policy areas and contexts;
Data scanning to identify “reform-breaking data” (i.e. key subjective indicators and targets) that can be used to measure how effective the case for reform has been in building public support; and
A social listening tool to help assess how the public is responding to the main aspects of the government’s case for reform. An example is provided in Chapter 2 through a case study of the 2023 French pension reform.
