The Overton window, a once-niche academic political science concept, has become a key concept used to explain the rise of Donald Trump and Brexiteers, and is important to understanding how the winds of political discourse change.
What is the Overton window?
Definition and explanation
The Overton window of political possibility is the range of ideas the public is willing to consider and accept.
In the United States, the idea of different races mixing in public or women’s suffrage were once considered fringe, extreme policies. That they’re now deemed common sense, reflects progress in shifting the Overton window.
A politician seeking to maximise their chances of reelection should determine where the Overton window for key policy issues is, via public opinion polls and other means, so they can successfully campaign on those ideas.
Public officials cannot enact any policy they please like they’re ordering dessert from a menu. They have to choose from among policies that are politically acceptable at the time. And we believe the Overton window defines that range of ideas.
- Joseph Lehman, a colleague of Joseph Overton who developed the idea after Overton died, explained in an interview with the New York Times
How do you shift the Overton window?
The most common misconception is that lawmakers themselves are in the business of shifting the Overton window. That is absolutely false. Lawmakers are actually in the business of detecting where the window is, and then moving to be in accordance with it.
- Joseph Lehman
If politicians must locate the window, think tanks and social movements must shift the Overton window to succeed in their advocacy. They must convince voters that policies outside the window should be in it.
Do you break or budge the window?
Namesake Joseph P. Overton, who was a senior vice president at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a free-market libertarian think tank, contended that pushing for extreme positions is more effective at changing public opinion. However, there are multiple approaches to shifting the status quo. For example, similar to the foot-in-the-door technique used in sales, one could advocate for small but gradually larger shifts to a policy.
Pulling the rope sideways
Another strategy is to try to avoid playing a game of political tug-of-war altogether. As the economist Robin Hanson puts, it: pull the rope sideways. Instead of joining a side and pulling on the rope (of the Overton window), pull it sideways in a direction no one will resist.
For example, instead of trying to push for increases or decreases in the overall tax rate (an area that gets a lot of resistance from both sides), a strategy of pulling the rope sideways would involve aiming to increase the effectiveness with which it is spent. The social good from spending might be a consideration that is both more neglected, but also more tractable and easier to see changes in because both parties would prefer to see it spent more effectively. Pursuing neglected and tractable policy changes could be a route to finding more socially valuable ideas.
How to most effectively produce social change remains an open question requiring empirical evidence, and the answer might depend on the specific case being examined, so let’s explore through some contemporary examples.
Overton window examples
Examples of the Overton window shifting historically include women’s suffrage, abolishing of slavery, and the growing acceptance of IVF, to more contemporary examples like Bernie Sanders’s advocacy for universal health care, gay marriage, and concern for animal welfare.
Growing support for same-sex marriage
Support in the United States for same sex marriage has catapulted into the Overton window of not just political possibility, but legal feasibility, being now legal in all 50 states.
Democrats' support of same-sex marriage has grown 50 percentage points from 33% to 83% since 1996 — the most among political party groups.
Example of the Overton window shifting: Growing US support for same-sex marriage Source: Gallup.
How Trump shifts the Overton window
Vox explains how Donald Trump attempts to shift the Overton window.
Growing acceptance of IVF
Social and policy change happens only incrementally for the vast majority of the time (i.e. at an equilibrium) but with interspersed periods of rapid change — a so-called punctuated equilibrium.
Many factors can cause these large equilibrium shifts to alter public attitudes towards a subject and technical feasibility is one of them. As Nick Bostrom and Carl Shulman point out in their paper Embryo Selection for Cognitive Enhancement, public attitudes towards in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) dramatically increased as technological feasibility went from merely theoretical to widespread availability. Only 18% of Americans said they would personally use IVF in 1970 when it was not widely available to 53% in 2003.
The expanding moral circle and concern for animal welfare
As the philosopher Peter Singer has explored in more detail in his book The Expanding Circle, our concern for others is gradually expanding beyond ourselves and our family, to include others from our nation, and, increasingly, people overseas, and non-human animals. A Gallup poll has shown support for animal rights has grown since 2008.
Say you want to advance the plight of animal welfare in our society, should you: i) make the case for a currently “unthinkable” ideas (like legal rights for insects)?; or ii) advocate for smaller, incremental changes (like more humane conditions for chickens on farms)?
In the animal welfare case, this is hotly debated (see, for example, the Wikipedia pages for abolitionism and welfarism). Another possibility is that the best strategy is a mix between two that creates an equilibrium: the stronger the radical pulling on the Overton, the greater the incentive for smaller, more incremental pulling.