The Electoral Commission: Putting behavioural economic theory into practice
Executive summary
This is the story of how the Electoral Commission put behavioural economic theory into practice and persuaded over 1.5 million people to add their details to the electoral register.
In the build up to the 2015 general election, the Commission's data indicated that 7.5 million British citizens were not correctly registered to vote, with registration numbers having fallen by c.920,000 in the last year alone.1Despite a campaign to drive awareness of the need to register just 6 months earlier, the importance of the registration message just wasn't...