To date, most research in the nudge literature has focused on changing the behaviors of citizens; much less work in comparison has examined the impact of nudge on policymakers’ decisions [1, 2]. Elected politicians have been shown to be equally or more susceptible than citizens to the sunk-cost fallacy, the status-quo bias, temporal discounting, and risk-seeking during uncertain policy decisions [3]. The degree to which policymakers digress from rational decision making may have important implications for policymaking. It is time to reorient the focus of nudge onto government itself — nudging policymakers directly to improve the way that policy is made [1].
Gender equity in policy is one area where nudge may help. In 2015, the Canadian federal government adopted the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women’s Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. As part of this declaration, Canada made a commitment to “gender mainstreaming” ensuring that attention to gender equity is central to all governmental activities [4]. Canadian territorial governments, however, never built this goal into their legislative systems, meaning that there is no overarching requirement to conduct gender-based analysis on new and existing policies. As a result, issues of gender are rarely considered in policymaking, and policies often have unequal impacts on different genders.
Gender equity may have been overlooked by policymakers due to high information processing demands associated with the policymaking environment, where information needs to be gathered and processed quickly. Policymakers simply do not have the time and attentional capacity to learn about and consider every policy issue [5]. In a policymaking environment, presenting policymakers with information in a short, accessible format is often desirable, which reduces information complexity and facilitates decision making [5–7]. One effective way to do this is to provide policymakers with a policy briefing, which is a non-technical synthesis of an issue intended to influence decision making about complex policies [8]. Policy briefings are a common method of communication with policymakers, and have been shown to be effective at increasing awareness and influencing policymakers’ beliefs about target issues [8, 9].
Additionally, since politicians tend to be reliant on public opinion for re-election, increasing the salience of political accountability may be an effective way of increasing commitment toward particular issues. A public pledge is a specific strategy for increasing policymakers’ commitment through either verbal or written promise to act, binding a policymaker to a particular behavior and increasing their self-expectations for engaging in that behavior [10–12]. Public pledges are particularly effective because they increase political accountability and emotional investment with the issue [13]. Many studies have found that public pledges, both alone and combined with other interventions, can be effective in promoting a broad range of target behaviors, including pro-social behaviors such as recycling [14], towel reuse among hotel guests [15], reducing water consumption [16], energy saving [17], and health behaviors such as seat belt use [18], particularly when the pledges are made publicly instead of privately [19].
There is a growing need for Canadian territorial governments to employ methods such as policy briefings and public pledges to increase awareness, understanding, and commitment on the issue of gender equity in policy. As of 2021, the territorial government of the Northwest Territories (NWT) has identified gender equity as a key legislative priority. Furthermore, the Status of Women Council of the NWT is an organization committed to furthering gender equity in the NWT, supporting community outreach and public awareness initiatives on the issue, and working closely with municipal and territorial policymakers.
Of the limited research on nudging policymakers, a few studies showed that personal stories (i.e., narratives) provide a persuasive medium for the promotion of behavior change [20–22], in increased support for controversial political policies [23] and improving health-related behaviors [24]. Meta-analytic evidence provided by Braddock & Dillard [25] suggests that personal stories exert a causal influence on four primary indices of persuasion: beliefs, attitudes, intentions, and behaviors; while other research [26–28] suggests there are multiple psychological routes leading to these persuasive effects.
The first route is immersion in a narrative that transports the reader into the story, such that they vicariously experience events as they unfold. Transportation influences real-world beliefs by suspending the tendency to counterargue about the veracity of the information presented in the story, thereby changing opinions to be in line with the story’s message [29]. In the second route, identification with a protagonist leads to greater empathy and emotional engagement with the story, which, in turn, leads to the adoption of the protagonist’s perspectives and beliefs [30]. Affective responses may mediate the effect of narratives on behavioral intention [31–33]. However, some studies suggest that personalized narratives that focus on episodic information about individual incidents may not always confer persuasive benefits, particularly when the goal is to mobilize collective action towards a social cause [34]. In such instances, personalization detracts from the larger structural cause of the problem.
A considerable body of research suggests that a single identifiable protagonist is more effective than a larger group to increase aid behavior (i.e., identifiable victim effect [37]). Theoretical accounts suggest that a variety of psychological mechanisms contribute to this phenomenon, including increased emotional reactivity [35–38], perceived impact of helping [37, 39], and perceived responsibility to help [35, 37, 40]. This is consistent with research suggesting that narratives may have an indirect effect on behavioral intentions by increasing personal norms, or a perceived personal obligation to act [26].
In the current study, we aim to draw attention to gender equity from policymakers in the NWT territorial government by inviting them to attend a policy briefing on gendered impacts of policy and to sign a public pledge to lead and advocate for equity-oriented policymaking. In the treatment condition, the invitation and briefing include two personal stories or narratives about two individuals who experienced unequal impacts from certain policies. In the control condition, no personal stories are included. We pre-registered one hypothesis, as well as several exploratory analyses at (https://osf.io/ht3yn). Our pre-registered hypothesis is that the treatment condition will have a higher rate of attendance at the briefing sessions than the control group. As exploratory analyses, we will also examine if the treatment group has a higher rate of accepting the email invitation or signing the pledge than the control group.
Pilot Studies
We conducted two pilot studies to examine whether our interventions and measures would be appropriate for policymakers in the NWT. The first pilot study included 20 policymakers who were randomly assigned to one of four groups. In the control group, we emailed policymakers to invite them to sign a public pledge with a link to a website (https://www.noeconomicabuse.com/) where they could sign the pledge. The website was developed by the Status of Women Council of the NWT. In the story group, we sent the same email to policymakers, which also contained two personal stories of two women whose lives had been disproportionally impacted by policies. The reason for using two stories is to demonstrate the disproportionate harm and benefit from policies. One story depicted a woman who was disadvantaged by a housing policy and the other story showed another woman who was helped by a job training policy. The third (checklist) group received the same email as in the control group but containing a checklist describing how to make the pledge. Finally, the fourth group received the email with both personal stories and the checklist.
On average, 35% of the policymakers across the four conditions clicked on the link to the website, but none of them signed the public pledge. This result gave us pause in focusing on pledge signing as the primary behavior to change. Policymakers may have been hesitant to sign the pledge because they did not have enough information on the topic to make a decision. With these considerations in mind, we conducted a second pilot study with several changes to the study design. First, we reduced the number of conditions from four to two (personal stories vs. control), to maximize the number of participants in each condition. Second, we shifted the focus of pledge signing to attending an online policy briefing. We reasoned that attending an online policy briefing may be less consequential than signing a public pledge and it also provides more information to policymakers.
In the second pilot study, we sent an email invitation (as well as additional reminder emails) to another set of 20 policymakers to attend an online policy briefing where we gave a presentation on gender and policymaking. At the end of the briefing, we sent them the link to the pledge website. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups. In the control group, the email contained an invitation to attend an online policy briefing and a Zoom link. In the treatment group, the email also contained two personal stories of how women have been impacted by policies. Out of 10 participants in the treatment group, one participant attended the briefing, but none signed the pledge. No participants from the control group attended the briefing or signed the pledge. While response rate and attendance were low, we were encouraged that at least one policymaker attended the briefing. Thus, we chose to focus on attendance rate as our primary behavioral measure based on these pilots.