Working Group
Risk and Uncertainty Among Polities in Crisis
Overview
Effective democratic governance requires both coordination and cooperation among citizens. A significant literature exists that assesses the institutional mechanisms used to achieve these goals in Advanced Industrial Democracies, but there remains considerable debate about precisely how polities in crisis navigate the many obstacles to effective coordination. Polities in crisis include societies rent by civil and communal conflict, those beset by economic underdevelopment and corruption, and those victimized by natural disasters that exceed the capacities of political institutions. Not surprisingly, polities in crisis tend to persistently suffer from an array of dilemmas that make democratic reforms almost impossible to realize. The members of the Risk and Uncertainty Working Group propose to initiate a research project that examines the capacity of polities in crisis to coordinate and cooperate in support of democratic governance. Beginning as a series of discussions between Regina Smyth (Political Science), Christiana Ochoa (Law), Archana Sridhar (Law), and Brian Shoup (Political Science), the working group’s focus is on the ways that citizens in crisis-prone societies mitigate coordination and cooperation dilemmas in light of risk and uncertainty.
One of the key problems faced by polities in crisis is the absence of mechanisms to deal with high degrees of risk and uncertainty. Risk and uncertainty are related concepts that deal with the lack of information to assess personal well-being and the value of political actions in pursuit of common goals. In situations of risk, citizens may be able to predict the result of their actions within some broad outlines (that is, assign probabilities to potential outcomes) but they cannot identify the precise consequences or benefits of particular actions. In situations of uncertainty, on the other hand, the individual has no capacity to assign probabilities and is therefore unable to connect actions to outcomes. Under uncertainty, political scientists posit that citizens and their leaders will be incapable of coordination or cooperation, even when it is in their best interest. For instance, we know that political refugees may not be able to assess the consequences of returning to their homes. We also know that they see very different impediments to return, ranging from the threat of physical violence to the lack of food, disruption of familial relations, or an inability to protect property rights. Likewise, they have varied perceptions of the institutions, laws, and norms that can diminish uncertainty and provide the basis for renewed coordination and cooperation.
These two key concepts—risk and uncertainty—have been conceptualized in many different ways, including in literatures on the sociology of risk as well as through game theory. Yet, while both concepts are clearly related, uncertainty and risk remain very difficult to measure and the relationship between the two concepts remains an open question. Although social scientists tend to conceptualize risk attitudes and uncertainty as shared attitudes, referring for instance to “minorities at risk” or “societies at risk,” evidence shows that individuals within similar groups may hold very different risk attitudes while experiencing the same events. Risk and uncertainty may also originate in threats to basic social structures and informal institutions, and not necessarily in concerns for political rights or the integrity of formal institutional or legal structures. In other words, social and cultural institutions may play similar roles as more formal structures in decreasing risk and uncertainty, although they are frequently ignored by democracy assistance programs.
More alarmingly, the underlying assumptions and approaches that inform the study of political and economic behavior in risky and uncertain environments are highly variegated among different academic disciplines. This poses a significant problem for both theorists and practitioners since the absence of a generally agreed upon framework limits the ability of meaningful cooperation between academics and policymakers.
Proposed Activities
The Working Group on Risk and Uncertainty proposes a multi-stage project that ultimately will help us arrive at more useable measures of how citizens assess risk and uncertainty in crisis situations. Such measures will be immensely helpful in helping academics and practitioners understand how institutions can help or hinder coordination and cooperation. Obviously, developing measures of this sort requires that the working group navigate a rather extensive literature that spans many disciplinary areas. To that end, the group will begin its work in the Fall of 2008 by organizing a series of faculty seminars that bring together academics working in different intellectual traditions that deal with risk and uncertainty. These literatures include, but are certainly not limited to, theories of economic behavior, cognitive sciences and psychology, mathematical and statistical approaches stressing Bayesian principles, social scientific theories using new institutional economics, and anthropological approaches that stress the fundamental roles played by informal social institutions.
As a means of initiating this process, the working group will identify and hire a number of graduate research assistants to assist with bibliographic development in the Fall of 2008. These bibliographies will provide a foundation for the group’s cross-disciplinary focus. Over the course of the 2008-09 academic year, the working group will use the opportunities afforded by both bibliographic development and faculty seminars to forge a framework for assessing risk and uncertainty and the ways that human behavior in crisis situations affect how coordination and cooperation dilemmas are mitigated. We expect to create a more robust literature on polities in crisis across a range of literatures. Our research and insights will then be brought to bear on questions that relate to democratic and economic development and democracy assistance. The resulting data will be a significant asset in its own right and will be available to students who share our interest, as well as to the broader community of policymakers, good governance activists, and international development workers. A central task for humanitarian, security, and democracy assistance programs is to ameliorate concerns of risk and uncertainty by guaranteeing human and political rights, food supplies, and economic development. Mapping shared concerns and perceptions of effectiveness regarding a range of solutions to these global problems will provide better guidance to NGOs and governments.
