Identifying types of targets and what motivates targets (policy-takers behaviour and compliance)
Most of the concerns raised above, when they have been examined, have been analyzed in the case of policy-makers. But there is a large second area of concern which also exists: that related to the adverse or malicious behaviour of policy “takers”. This issue also has to do with mendacity and/or Machiavellian behaviour on the part of policy-takers, a subject often glossed over in studies of policy compliance and ‘target behaviour’ (Howlett 2018).
Here the idea commonly found in the policy literature is that the only real issue in policy compliance is merely a matter of “getting incentives (and disincentives)’ right” (Howlett 2018). This not only ignores aspects involved in the social and political construction of targets highlighted above (Schneider and Ingram 1990a, 1990b), but also minimizes the complex behaviours which go into compliance, most notably considerations of legitimacy, but also related to cupidity, trust and other social and individual behavioural characteristics as well as the operation of a wide variety of descriptive and injunctive social norms (Howlett 2019; Bamberg and Moser 2007; Thomas et al 2016).
Not the least of the problem with this view is that it has a notion of policy-takers as static targets who do not try, or at least do not try very hard, to evade policies or even to profit from them (Howlett 2019; Braithwaite 2003; Marion and Muehlegger 2007). Such activities on the part of policy takers, however, are key in determining the success of various government initiatives ranging from tobacco control to bus fare evasion (Delbosc and Currie 2016; Kulick et al 2016) and should be ‘designed for’ in the sense that determined non-compliance and gaming should be taken into account in designing policies, along with many other such behaviours, such as free-ridership, fraud and misrepresentation (Harring 2016). As it stands, these are often thought of as purely ‘implementation’ issues and left up to administrators to deal with rather than forming an essential component of policy formulation and design (Doig and Johnson 2001; Kuhn and Siciliani (2013).
But understanding this behaviour on the part of policy takers is central to better understanding policy tool selection and effectiveness.