In recent years, Behavioral Sciences have achieved unprecedented prominence in public administration, shaping how governments design and evaluate interventions. Yet, their practical application has largely remained confined to individual-level instruments—such as nudges—during the implementation phase. This narrow focus has overlooked the broader institutional, social, and cultural processes through which public policies are conceived, negotiated, and sustained.
This conceptual paper argues that the entire public policy cycle can be understood as a behavioral system, composed of interdependent practices that occur across individuals, groups, and institutions. By combining insights from Behavior Analysis, Cultural Behavior Science, and Behavioral Governance, it proposes a multilevel framework for interpreting agenda-setting, formulation, implementation, and evaluation as interconnected behavioral phenomena. Each stage of the cycle involves interdependent behavioral patterns maintained by shared practices of social reinforcement, institutional contingencies, and historical processes of selection that determine how problems are defined, solutions are chosen, and collective outcomes are stabilized.
The analysis suggests that policymaking is not merely a technical or rational process, but a continuous interaction between repertoires of behavior and the contexts that shape them. Understanding how contingencies of reinforcement operate across the entire policy cycle, from the social negotiation of agendas to the formulation of alternatives, the coordination of implementation, and the feedback mechanisms of evaluation, enables a richer diagnosis of why certain policies emerge, gain traction, and persist, while others fail to do so.
By reframing the policy cycle as a dynamic field of behavioral interdependence, this approach extends the scope of Behavioral Public Policy beyond cognitive biases and individual decision-making. It invites researchers and practitioners to view public governance itself as an ongoing cultural experiment—one that requires deliberate monitoring, feedback, and adaptation to maintain both effectiveness and legitimacy over time.