“The Department of Political Economy is seeking to appoint two Postdoctoral Research Associates to work full time on the research project DERISK with Steven Klein. The Systemic Risk and the Transformation of Democracy (DERISK) project is funded by a UKRI Frontier Research Grant (successfully evaluated for the ERC Starting Grant and funded by UKRI as part of the UKRI Horizon Europe guarantee). From financial crises to climate change and pandemics, over the past several decades societies have increasingly faced systemic risks. Drawing together political philosophy, the philosophy of risk, and empirical research on systemic risk in political science, sociology, economics, risk studies, and complexity theory, the project asks: what happens to democracy when systemic risks become a central problem of politics? And how should democratic institutions govern these new forms of risk?
To answer these questions, the project will develop a new theory of risk democracy. As empirically-grounded political theory, this model will provide both a diagnostic account of how the changing structure of risk is challenging welfare-state modes of democratic risk-sharing, focusing on three case studies: financial risk, climate change risk, and pandemic risk.”
