Políticas públicas baseadas em evidências comportamentais: reflexões a partir do Projeto de Lei 488/2017 do Senado

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate whether Senate Bill 488/2017 can make policy-makers more receptive to the use evidences, especially behavioral ones. Our hypothesis is that the directive in the bill can increase the use of evidences in public policy propositions, in recommending control mechanisms and methods of evaluation of laws that creates new public policies. We will do the analysis by means of a literature review of the relevant concepts we are using and by a critical evaluation of the legislative text we are approaching. The structure of the text is as follows: we start by introducing the bill, its proposed legislative amendment and the reasons for its proposal. Next, we discuss what is a public policy, both from the academic point of view and from what the text of the bill tells us. Then, we approach the evidence-based movement, talking about its emergence, the multiple ways to use evidence in policies, some criticisms of it, and ways to answer them. The next move is the use of behavioral evidence on policies; we first present the nudges, an important type of behavioral policy in academia, and then expand the use of evidences to other stages of policies. We conclude that the use of behavioral evidence can increase the policy’s effectiveness and improve the performance of the government, and that the bill, in some of its directives, paves the way for the use of behavioral evidence. The bill can be seen as an incentive for the dialogue and interchange between public policy-makers and researchers collecting relevant behavioral data.