Politicians under Radical Uncertainty: How Uncertain Phenomena Influence Political Elites' Behavior

Project Information

RADIUNCE

Grant agreement ID: 101043543

DOI

10.3030/101043543

EC signature date 26 August 2022

Start date 1 February 2023

End date 31 January 2028

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 995 424,00

EU contribution

€ 1 995 424,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITEIT UTRECHT
Netherlands

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - RADIUNCE (Politicians under Radical Uncertainty: How Uncertain Phenomena Influence Political Elites' Behavior)

Reporting period: 2023-02-01 to 2025-07-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Political elites—such as ministers, parliamentarians or local politicians—face numerous phenomena that are characterized by uncertainty, from pandemics, to artificial intelligence, to economic crises. Some of this uncertainty is resolvable and can be removed with more or better information; other uncertainty is radical and cannot. The overall aim of the RADIUNCE project is to develop a theory that explains politicians’ behavioral responses to both radically and resolvably uncertain phenomena—something about which remarkably little is known. When and why do politicians for example avoid uncertain phenomena, rely on heuristics (e.g. comparing Covid-19 to the flu), or apply all available means to address the uncertain phenomenon (i.e. responding comprehensively)? Examining this is urgent, because the responses directly impact democracies’ effectiveness in solving problems. For example, avoiding a virus can cost lives; using heuristics can lead to flawed decisions; and a comprehensive approach is both time consuming and ineffective when the uncertainty is radical in nature.

RADIUNCE addresses three key problems in the field: First, the lack of theory on radical uncertainty; second, the lack of comparative data from politicians themselves; and third, the lack of empirical evidence of how individual and institutional factors shape politicians’ responses to uncertainty. Its objectives are to:

1. Identify and map how politicians in four countries with different opportunities and constraints of responding to uncertainty—Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, and the US—have responded to radically and resolvably uncertain phenomena between 1996 and 2024.
2. Explain variation in these responses across countries, politicians, and over time.
3. Reveal how these responses influence democracies’ effectiveness in solving problems.

To achieve this, RADIUNCE adopts a multidisciplinary approach, integrating insights from political science, public administration, decision science, psychology, and behavioral economics. It also collects new, comparative data from politicians through an innovative combination of automated text analysis and survey experiments. Using a multimethod approach, it combines quantitative techniques with qualitative methods like process tracing, Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), and interviews. The outcome will be a new theoretical model of political elite behavior that puts radical uncertainty at the center of political decision making.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

During the first phase of the project, the activities of the RADIUNCE research team focused on developing the project’s conceptual and theoretical foundations and conducting the first data collection efforts. A key achievement from this period is a study, currently under review, which pioneers the concepts radical and resolvable uncertainty in political science and presents an Uncertainty Grid to empirically identify and map them. Building on this work, we used datasets like the World Uncertainty Index to categorize various uncertain phenomena (e.g. macroeconomics, climate change). We analyzed Covid-19 as a prime example, mapping how different aspects of Covid-19 (e.g. virus development, vaccines) shifted between radical and resolvable uncertainty in the UK and the Netherlands.

Another key achievement is an article, published in Political Studies Review, which introduces a multidisciplinary conceptual map of politicians’ responses to uncertain phenomena. We used this article to create a codebook to identify the different responses in text, piloting it with UK parliamentary debates on Covid-19. In a current study, we are examining UK politicians’ reactions to uncertainty in the Covid-19 hearings, analyzing how the type of uncertainty (radical, resolvable) influences their responses. Moreover, a systematic review of politicians’ psychological characteristics and their implications for political behavior is finalized for journal submission. This review provides key input for RADIUNCE’s survey experiments with politicians that we will conduct in the upcoming period.

Regarding data collection: we compiled a dataset of US Congress speeches and politicians’ bibliographical data (1994-2024) to study politicians’ expressed uncertainty. Moreover, in a working paper, we present an automated classification model to detect populist language in US Presidential and Governor speeches (2010-2018)—a method that could help measure uncertainty in political speech. A paper accepted for publication in Party Politics presents the Presidential and Governor speeches dataset.

We also engaged in numerous networking activities such as: participating in a multidisciplinary workshop on uncertainty communication; presenting papers and co-organizing panels at major conferences; and organizing meetings with scholars and research teams. We also conducted outreach activities to diverse audiences, from pupils at elementary schools and high schools, to policy makers, to the broader public.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

RADIUNCE’s potential impacts and results beyond the state of the arts are conceptual, empirical, methodological, and theoretical:

• Conceptually, it pioneers the concept of radical uncertainty in political science. Putting radical uncertainty central stage in theories of political behavior is important: most existing theories focus only on resolvable uncertainty while much of the uncertainty political actors face is radical in nature.
• Empirically, it collects unique comparative data of politicians—direct and at-a-distance—to examine their responses to both radically and resolvably uncertain phenomena in four countries with different institutional opportunities and constraints for decision making under uncertainty. These data enable a new understanding of political elites’ behavior that is also relevant for other fields in political science, like party behavior and welfare state research.
• Methodologically, it adopts an ambitious multi-method approach that can also further other social and behavioral sciences, like economics or psychology. This holds specifically for the collection of comparative data by means of computational text analyses and survey experiments, combined with data from qualitative approaches (e.g. QCA, interviews).
• Theoretically, it employs an original multidisciplinary approach that integrates insights from political science, behavioral economics, decision theory, psychology, and public administration.

The integrated findings will lead to a novel theoretical model of how both radically and resolvably uncertain phenomena influence political elites’ behavior, explaining how they respond to the challenges and opportunities in our face-paced world from economic crises, to pandemics, to digitalization. Hereby, RADIUNCE’s fundamental research of real politicians’ behavior under different types of uncertainty may substantially improve democratic problem solving in such key circumstances.

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