Dr Steven Klein (King's College London) will give an IPW Lecture entitled Systemic Risk and the Transformation of Democracy on 24 April 2023.

The event will take place in the conference room (NIG, 2nd floor) at 5 pm.

Abstract

This talk argues that contemporary democracies are in crisis, in part, because democratic institutions face new types of systemic risks. Financial instability, the pandemic, and climate change are core challenges facing contemporary governments. In each case, democratic institutions are tasked with responding to systemic risks. Unlike individual risks such as workplace injury, systemic risks arise at the aggregate level. They are the product of the complex interaction between individually low and moderate risk decisions. Those individual decisions are then amplified by social systems through the unintentional coordination of action. Current democratic risk-sharing institutions—the welfare state—evolved in response to the individual-level risks of industrialization. Such institutions lack the tools to manage these systemic risks in an inclusive and equitable manner. Rather, the scale and unpredictability of systemic risks is giving rise to new emergency and technocratic governance structures. In response, this talk discusses the need for a new theory of risk democracy with two overarching goals: first, to provide a diagnosis of how new systemic risks are challenging existing models of democratic risk-sharing. Second, to develop a normative theory of how democratic institutions could govern systemic risks in a more inclusive manner.