Matthew Johnson, Elliott Johnson, Irene Hardill and Daniel Nettle
This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Breaking the Overton Window: on the need for adversarial co-production’
Co-production has emerged as one of the key concepts in understanding knowledge-policy interactions and is associated with involvement of users of public services in their design and delivery. At a time of permacrisis, in which ever increasing numbers of Britons are exposed to financial insecurity, the need for transformative evidence-based policymaking is urgent and great. This is particularly important in highly distressed ‘left-behind’ communities targeted by the UK Government for Levelling Up, which constitutes an attempt to improve the infrastructural, economic, social and health environments of less affluent parts of the UK.
Often, policymakers regard the transformative policies capable of addressing these crises as beyond the ‘Overton Window’, which describes a range of policies in the political centre that are acceptable to the public. This window of opportunity can shift to encompass different policies, but movement is slow and policymakers generally believe that significant change lies outside it. This creates an Overton Window-based roadblock in evidence-based policymaking.
Our Evidence and Policy article, ‘Breaking the Overton Window: on the need for adversarial co-production’, outlines an emerging approach to breaking open that window. ‘Adversarial co-production’ is a means of creating narratives with opponents of evidence-based policies (EBPs) in order to persuade people like them to support those policies and influence design and implementation. It builds on adversarial collaboration within behavioural science, which involves colleagues who disagree on hypotheses agreeing upon design of studies in order to provide pathways through to consensus on findings. We argue that opponents of EBPs are actually best placed to persuade others on the need for the policies themselves. This is because they identify the salient aspects and actors, and frame the implementation, of policies in ways that proponents are often unable.
Our approach builds on and inverts Greve’s evaluation of evidence of impact from narratives on perceptions of welfare policy via ‘myths’ that link people’s often genuine concerns for their material interests to policy appraisals that, in reality, worsen their lives. This phenomenon is apparent in the opposition of many of the poorest in society to taxing the richest or with support for inequalities justified through skill and opportunity in the ‘American Dream’ being negatively correlated with socio-economic status (SES). We think that the fatalism of progressive policymakers in light of this is wholly self-defeating: if people can be persuaded by ideologically driven narratives to support policies that harm their self-interests, surely they can be persuaded by narratives with similar structures to support policies that genuinely and transformatively advance their interests.
Put simply, successful narratives highlight people’s genuine material interests and ‘help each other see from different perspectives’, invoking interests that align with policy content. Our work on Basic Income indicates this. While we report consistently high 68-80% levels of support for Basic Income across the UK and in Red Wall constituencies, the narratives produced by the 7-12% of people who hate Basic Income were both different to those that proponents produce and compelling in their identification of actors that matter to them. We identified and synthesised a series of narratives each focused on a single good. The most successful narrative focused on security:
Universal Basic Income (UBI) is a living pension for all adult citizens, providing state support for your basic needs. It would be a safety net during short periods of unemployment, giving you some time to support yourself and your family while looking for employment. This helps to stop you slipping into poverty and ensures that you do not face homelessness. As many infamous cases have shown, this is vital for us, as the current system does not keep us secure. There was the case of the diabetic British War Veteran whose Universal Credit payment lapsed, leaving him with no Money to top up his electricity meter. This meant that he could not keep his medicine refrigerated, meaning that he went into a diabetic coma and died. In our country, you should not have the stress of worrying about meeting your basic needs. You should not have to worry that taking on short-term work will leave you unable to support yourself. UBI secures you from the many unpredictable events in modern society.
When presented to people who also express initial firm opposition to Basic Income, the narrative contributed to a mean increase of 31.43 points on the 100-point scale (15.56-46.99), rendering this policy acceptable even to the small proportion (7-12%) who were most against it on first encounter.
Recent history, and the approach and evidence we examine in our debate piece, all suggests that policymakers who believe in a fixed Overton Window are wrong. Austerity, Brexit, COVID lockdowns and Furlough are all policies that most policymakers and pollsters would have confidently rejected as sitting outside the Overton Window even months before their implementation. As the current Labour Leadership’s rejection of anything approaching transformative indicates, while policy entrepreneurs on the right recognise the fluidity of public opinion, progressive policymakers are basically behind the times and are operating within ever-diminishing spaces. This only increases the chances of our permacrisis spiralling ever downward.
Funding details: This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust under Grant 223553/Z/21/Z. For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.
Image credit: Photo by Nicolas Solerieu on Unsplash
Matthew Johnson is Professor of Public Policy at Northumbria University and Editor of Global Discourse. He has recently on examination of the public health case for Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a means of mitigating health and economic inequalities.
Elliott Johnson is Senior Research Fellow in Public Policy at Northumbria University. His research currently focuses on basic income, in particular, understanding its health impact, economic feasibility, public acceptability and the development of narratives capable of persuading opponents.
Irene Hardill is Professor of Public Policy at Northumbria University. She has a particular expertise in volunteering and the voluntary and community sector and has recently led ESRC supported research on mobilising voluntary action during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Daniel Nettle is Professor of Community Wellbeing at Northumbria University and Directeur de recherche, Institut Jean Nicod. His work spans the biological and social sciences and is concerned with economic and social inequality, trust, cooperation and antisocial behaviour and moral and political cognition.
Read the original research in Evidence & Policy:
Johnson, E.A. Hardill, I. Johnson, M.T. & Nettle, D. (2023). ‘Breaking the Overton Window: on the need for adversarial co-production. Evidence & Policy, DOI: 10.1332/17442648Y2023D000000005.
Bovaird, T. (2024). Breaking the glass in the ‘Overton Window’: the role of adversarial co-production. Evidence & Policy, DOI: 10.1332/17442648Y2023D000000020.
If you enjoyed this blog post, you may also be interested in reading:
Obstacles to co-producing evaluation knowledge: power, control and voluntary sector dynamics
Learning from failures in knowledge exchange and turning them into successes
Practical points of failure in police-university collaboration: reconceiving knowledge exchange
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