Public acceptability is an issue of core importance for policymakers and for the international organisations, such as the OECD, that are tasked with advising them. Ambitious policies are needed to enhance well-being, overcome fiscal challenges and successfully navigate the profound changes brought about by population ageing, climate change, rising inequalities, and the digital transition. These policies cannot be implemented on the scale required or sustained over time without a better understanding of how to build sufficient public support. At the same time, efforts to measure and analyse the subjective factors (such as perceptions and attitudes) and social factors (such as shared norms and social preferences) that shape people’s views and responses to policy in different areas have greatly increased, providing a growing body of evidence on the “demand-side” of policy. The OECD has notably introduced new data collection tools of this kind, including the Risks that Matter cross-national survey, the Drivers of Trust in Public Institutions survey and the pilot survey on International Attitudes Towards Climate Policies.
Getting the Public on Side: How to Make Reforms Acceptable by Design takes stock of this emerging field and seeks to draw actionable lessons for improving the design, communication and implementation of reforms. The report contributes to two streams of OECD work: on the causes and consequences of inequality and on the political economy of reform. In particular, it builds on and extends the analysis conducted in two landmark OECD reports: Does Inequality Matter? How People Perceive Economic Disparities and Social Mobility and Making Reform Happen: Lessons from OECD Countries.
Does Inequality Matter? provided an in-depth study of the role played by subjective factors in an area where research is most advanced and the evidence best established, focusing on perceptions of inequality and their impact on people’s willingness to support redistributive and social welfare policies. In doing so, it highlighted the valuable additional insights that can be drawn by complementing conventional statistical measures of inequality with available “subjective” measures that reflect the way in which individuals perceive inequalities and social mobility. The current report addresses some of the outstanding methodological issues identified in Does Inequality Matter? and broadens the scope of analysis to other important forms of inequality, in line with the programme of work of the OECD Observatory on Social Mobility and Equal Opportunity.
Making Reform Happen provided a series of general and sector-specific lessons on the successful conduct of reform, based on combined quantitative and qualitative analysis of actual reform episodes in member-countries over a period of several decades. In doing so, it identified public acceptability as a key condition for the successful implementation of reforms. The current report seeks to update these lessons in light of the new insights that experimental methods and behavioural approaches allow on the “demand-side” of reform.
To help support its work in these areas, the OECD set up an interdisciplinary Expert Group on New Measures of the Public Acceptability of Reforms. This report is based on the input from this Expert Group.
The report was prepared and drafted by Neil Martin from the OECD Centre on Well-Being, Inclusion, Sustainability and Equal Opportunity (WISE), under the supervision of Fabrice Murtin (Head of the Research, Modelling and Advanced Analytics Unit, WISE). Max Salomon Ermel (WISE at the time of writing) provided excellent research assistance and contributed to Chapter 1. Lætitia Gauvin, Nicolò Gozzi, Simone Parazzoli, Marco Quaggiotto and Michele Tizzani (Institute for Scientific Interchange, ISI) provided the analysis for the case study of the 2023 French pension reform in Chapter 2.
The author warmly thanks Romina Boarini (Director, WISE) and all of the members of the OECD Expert Group on New Measures of the Public Acceptability of Reforms (see next page) for their contribution and guidance, as well as the country delegates to the OECD Working Party on Social Policy for their review and comments on an earlier draft of the report. Thanks are also due to Anne-Lise Faron for preparing the manuscript for publication, to Martine Zaïda and Taylor Kelly for providing support throughout on communication coordination and to Karin Klappacher, Gabrielle McFarlane-Smith and Marie-Anne Witcombe for helping support the activities of the Expert Group.
Finally, the author gratefully acknowledges the debt owed to OECD colleagues for their inputs, comments and insights. They include Carlotta Balestra, Emanuele Ciani and Michael Förster (WISE), Bert Brys, Yannic Rehm and Michael Sicsic (Centre for Tax Policy), Flore-Anne Messy (Directorate for Financial and Enterprise Affairs), Tomasz Kozluk and Tobias Kruse (Economics Department), Valerie Frey, Raphaela Hyee and Wouter de Tavernier (Directorate for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs), Mariana Prats and Chiara Varazzani (Directorate for Public Governance), William Tompson (Global Relations and Cooperation Directorate) and Åsa Johansson (at the time Statistics and Data Directorate).