Overton window
The range of policies a politician can advocate without being thought extreme. Ideas inside the window are debatable; ideas outside it are not discussed. Moving the window, by making the formerly unthinkable sayable, is a strategic aim of much propaganda.
Joseph Overton, of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Michigan, described the idea in the 1990s as a way of explaining to donors what a think tank does. Politicians, he argued, are constrained by what the public will accept, so the way to change policy is not to lobby politicians but to shift what the public will accept, after which the politicians follow. The window was named for him after his death in 2003 and has since become a general term.
The concept is neutral about direction and about method. A window can be moved by honest argument over decades, which is how most social change happens. It can also be moved by technique. Proposing something far outside the window makes a less extreme proposal look moderate by comparison, an application of anchoring. Repeating a formerly fringe claim until it is familiar moves it inward by Repetition alone. Redefinition of a word changes what falls inside. False Balance in news coverage places a fringe position inside the window by treating it as one side of a debate.
The term is now often used descriptively, to say that a position has become sayable, and sometimes as a boast, by those who moved it. Noticing the movement is itself a defense: a reader who remembers what was unsayable five years ago can ask who moved it and how.
Sources
- Lehman, Joseph G. "An Introduction to the Overton Window of Political Possibility." Mackinac Center for Public Policy, 2010. https://www.mackinac.org/12481
- Russell, Nathan J. "An Introduction to the Overton Window of Political Possibilities." Mackinac Center for Public Policy, 2006.