A Constitutional Economics Perspective on Soft Paternalism

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Abstract. Using a framework that distinguishes short-term consumer preferences, individual reflective preferences and political preferences, we discuss from a constitutional economics perspective whether individuals find it in their common constitutional interest to endow representatives and bureaucrats with the competence to impose soft paternalist policies. The focus is specifically on soft paternalist policies, because these often work with non-transparent "nudges" that are considered as manipulative in some contributions to the literature. We show that those soft paternalist policies that are manipulative indeed collide with three criteria of consumer sovereignty, reflective sovereignty and citizen sovereignty that can be argued to represent common constitutional interest of citizens. On the other hand, we argue that the set of paternalist policies that is deemed acceptable on the constitutional level is restricted to non-manipulative instruments, and their application as government policies is limited to cases with stable and very homogenous preferences. However, we also argue that competitive markets are capable of supplying many mechanisms that allow individuals to cope with problems in their decision-making processes on a private level. Terms of use: Documents inJEL-Classification: D11, D18, D63, D83, H11, Z18.

Nudging and Other Behaviourally Based Policies as Enablers for Environmental Sustainability

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Exploring the (behavioural) political economy of nudging

“…Sometimes, ambiguity about what 'welfare' is supposed to mean even pervades one and the same article, such as Sunstein (2013). 17 Hence, alternative normative benchmarks have been suggested, such as the general consensus criterion of constitutional economics (Schnellenbach, 2016;Schubert, 2014). Note that the ambiguity of the normative foundations of LP may contribute to its attractiveness for policy makers (see Section 4, below).…”

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“…Siehe zu den problematischen Aspekten beispielsweise Schnellenbach (2011Schnellenbach ( , 2014Schnellenbach ( . 2016 -Datenschutzbedenken (Bitkom 2015a: 33;Research2guidance 2014: 34).…”