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Abstract
A developing research program of behavioral political economy can help shed light on important social and political practices that fall outside the strict rational actor model but that are of central importance to democratic theory. Those practices include the deliberative activities of argumentation, information acquisition, and learning. Game theoretic models and experimental studies of collective decisions that are part of the behavioral political economy tradition offer insights into the strategic implications of these practices, linking them to ideological polarization and measures of the informational quality of individual and collective choices. In so doing, they help generate comprehensive assessments of these practices and their institutional influences, thus buttressing the normative philosophical arguments.

The connection between public administration and behavioral economics goes back to Herbert Simon, who recognized the tension between the institutional demands of rational efficiency and the reality of individuals' alternate objectives. There is now a concentrated research push at the intersection of behavioral economics and governance, following recently publicized evidence of favorable synergies. Public administration can use behavioral economics in a variety of implementations, from boosting public service motivation to improving policy compliance. This article reviews the current discourse on the development of behavioral public administration, describes some dominant concepts currently being applied, and then offers a framework with propositions for a theory of behavioral public administration in order to enable further experimental inquiry and inform better governance. Points for practitioners Behavioral public administration is a developing theory that may enable practitioners to employ alternative approaches to policy design and implementation. Using concepts of behavioral economics that describe individual decision-making with alternative objectives to traditional utility maximization, behavioral public administration shifts the reliance on traditional causal models away from rational ideals and toward actual behaviors that inhabit empirically evident biases.