Overton window

Overton window, political model describing the range of policies considered acceptable by the majority of a population at a particular time. The concept of the Overton window was developed in the 1990s by Joseph Overton, a libertarian political scientist. The model portrays a spectrum of positions, with more government regulation on one end and less government regulation on the other end. The extreme sides are considered to be the least widely accepted by voters. Overton argued that this spectrum describes how politicians choose which policies to endorse, and he suggested that they will most likely favor options in the middle of the spectrum rather than the extremes that, according to the model, would be the least palatable to voters. His theory was further developed into strategies for shifting the Overton window. Critics of the Overton window challenge its theory of change and its inability to explain the phenomenon of the eroding moderate center.

History

Overton developed the idea of what he called a “window of political possibility” while he was a fellow at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, an educational and research institution in Midland, Michigan, that favors limited government and free markets. A committed libertarian, Overton came to the Mackinac Center after pursuing a career as an electrical engineer and project manager at Dow Chemical Company. After switching gears to support Mackinac’s mission, he managed the think tank’s financial and construction matters—while earning a law degree on the side—and later worked on policy-centered research and writing. Overton ascended to the post of senior vice president at the Mackinac Center but perished when an ultralight plane that he was piloting crashed in Caro, Michigan, in 2003. His model was written down in longhand notes and initially called Window of Political Possibilities. Joseph Lehman, his colleague at the Mackinac Center, continued developing the concept, which grew in popularity, especially in libertarian policy circles, after Overton’s death. The model was posthumously termed the Overton window. In 2010 conservative political commentator Glenn Beck published a political thriller novel entitled The Overton Window that further propelled the idea toward popular awareness. Starting in 2016, during the first term of U.S. Pres. Donald Trump, the discussion of the Overton window expanded from far-right and libertarian conservative thinkers into mainstream political conversation.

How it works

Overton posited that politicians make policy choices from within the range of their constituents’ potential receptivity to a given policy, idea, or platform. The window illustrates the general public’s most acceptable policies in the center and the more untenable policies on the ends. The ends are located on the top and the bottom (or right and left, depending on the orientation of the graph), with policies on one end labeled “more free” and policies on the other labeled “less free,” depending on the degree of government intervention. Other variants of the idea illustrate the political spectrum from red (conservative) to blue (liberal). In some other renditions, the window is paired with six policy categories from least to most acceptable, labeled as: unthinkable, radical, acceptable, sensible, popular, and policy. Over time, as public opinion shifts, certain policies can move to new categories along the scale.

Examples

A useful example to illustrate shifts in the Overton window is the history of Prohibition—the prevention of the sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcoholic beverages—in the United States from 1920 to 1933. Prohibition was a widely popular stance in the early 20th century, safe for candidates to endorse, leading to the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution enacting Prohibition. That amendment was repealed 13 years later with the Twenty-first Amendment. Nearly a century later, in the early 21st century, endorsing full prohibition of alcohol sales, manufacture, and consumption across the U.S. would be considered almost unthinkable and is not supported as part of any mainstream party’s platform.

Many examples of shifting Overton windows concern rights of oppressed or minority groups. Abolition of chattel slavery was not initially mainstream but is now predominantly unquestioned. Women’s suffrage started as a movement in the mid-19th century and gradually picked up steam until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 prohibited discrimination against voters on the basis of sex in the United States. Same-sex marriage was not accepted in much of the Western world until the late 20th century when European countries began legalizing it. In the United States its public acceptance was low in the 1990s but had become a majority view by the time it was legalized by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2015.

Another clear illustration of a shifting Overton window is Brexit. The United Kingdom’s solid position within the European Union (EU) was increasingly questioned in the 1990s and 2000s as the Euroskepticism of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) gradually became more popular and the UKIP grew stronger electorally. Anti-immigration sentiment and opposition to the EU’s migration policies reached a tipping point in the 2010s. In a 2016 vote approximately 52 percent of voters in the United Kingdom opted to leave the EU, and the departure went into effect in 2020.

Methods of shifting the window

Political scientists have posited strategies by which politicians and others in the political arena might shift or expand the span of the Overton window to make specific policies more or less acceptable in public opinion. According to the Mackinac Center, it is very rare that politicians can move the window on their own, and most politicians choose policies within the window. However, some political scientists claim that it is possible for groups or organizations to alter the political placement of the window’s range, or expand its full spectrum of possible positions, by influencing public opinion through strategic campaigns.

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One strategy that economist Robin Hanson proposed for shifting the Overton window is “to pull the policy rope sideways.” This strategy promotes tangentially related policy proposals that move discourse about a larger policy matter in a different but related direction. For example, instead of debating raising or lowering taxes, one could shift to other tax concerns, such as how effectively taxes are spent, thus changing the focus of debate away from typical political tropes.

Another strategy attempts to espouse more fringe or radical ideas from outside the typical Overton window in order to expand public opinion of what falls into the acceptable range with the hope of pulling the center of public opinion slightly toward that fringe and thus partially or incrementally achieving policy goals. Overton argued that coherently supporting a fringe idea might slowly move radical ideas into the mainstream, and he suggested that think tanks, such as the Mackinac Center, are particularly effective at creating changes in public opinion in this manner.

Criticism

Critics of the Overton window point out that the theory reinforces the idea of the moderate center, meaning the perception that most of the population falls in the middle of the current liberal-conservative spectrum. A common illustration of this idea of the “window” uses the game of football and posits that most of the population is playing the political game between the 40-yard lines (in the middle of the field). Although some polls in the 1990s (when Overton developed his idea) showed that 40 percent of American voters identified as moderates, on individual policies or issues some research—such as political scientist Lee Drutman’s article “The Moderate Middle Is a Myth,” on the FiveThirtyEight statistics website—indicates that those same voters fall into one or the other nonmoderate end of the window, suggesting that the moderate middle is a mere mirage. Critics claim that the Overton window’s failure to represent an accurate view of the vast ideological diversity of self-proclaimed moderate voters makes it an unfit theory for describing popular policy choices.

Cultural critic Laura Marsh argued in a 2016 piece for The New Republic that the Overton window’s unified perspective on palatable public policy does not reflect contemporary reality; instead, she suggested that there are two Overton windows on either side of the political spectrum, and a full-spectrum Overton window no longer exists in the current U.S. political scene. As she wrote, “The Overton Window is ultimately a name for what we have lost, not an indication of where we are headed. Its popularity today represents a powerful nostalgia for the center.”

Another major critique of the Overton window questions its implication that pushing toward extreme ends will lead to moderate increments of change, rather than allowing for the possibility of relatively rapid shifts toward those extremes. Critics cite examples such as Donald Trump’s ability to pull political conversation quickly to the far right or the popularity of Bernie Sanders’s pull of the left-wing toward socialism as illustrating the possibility for larger shifts of the Overton window that have not been reconciled through moderation.