Fear of Democracy: A Cultural Evaluation of Sunstein on Risk

The effective regulation of risk poses a singular challenge to de-mocracy. The public welfare of democratic societies depends on their capacity to abate all manner of natural and man-made hazards — from environmental catastrophe and economic collapse to domestic terrorism and the outbreak of disease. But the need to form rational responses to these and other dangers also challenges democratic societies in a more fundamental way: by threatening their commitment to genuinely deliberative policymaking. Effective risk regulation depends on highly technical forms of scientific information — epidemiological, toxicological, economic, and the like. Most citizens don’t even have access to such information, much less the inclination and capacity to make sense of it. Why, then, should regulatory law afford any weight to the uneducated opinions of ordinary citizens as opposed to the reasoned judgments of politically insulated risk experts?

It is the urgency of this question that makes the study of risk perception a policy science of the first order. Employing a diverse array of methods from the social sciences, the field of risk perception seeks to comprehend the diverse processes by which individuals form beliefs about the seriousness of various hazards and the efficacy of measures designed to mitigate them. Risk perception scholars are not of one mind about the prospects for making public opinion conform to the best available scientific information on risk. But no one who aspires to devise procedures that make democratic policymaking responsive to such information can hope to succeed without availing herself of the insights this field has to offer.

Cass Sunstein’s Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle is a major contribution to the field of risk perception written in precisely this spirit. In Sunstein’s view, the major thing proponents of democratically grounded risk regulation have to fear, in essence, is fear itself. Adroitly synthesizing a vast body of empirical literature, Sunstein catalogues the numerous social and cognitive mechanisms that drive members of the public to form wildly overstated estimates of various societal dangers. He also proposes a number of important institutional devices designed to shield “deliberative democracy” from the pernicious influence of these “[r]isk panics” (p. 1). They include, principally, a form of expert cost-benefit analysis that would separate out considered public values from irrational public fears and a set of administrative procedures that would make law responsive to the former and impervious to the latter. Few recent works in the field of risk perception rival Sunstein’s in breadth, intelligence, and relevance.

But as masterful as Sunstein’s account is, its persuasiveness is undercut by Sunstein’s inattention to one of the most important recent advances in the science of risk perception. A growing body of work suggests that cultural worldviews permeate all of the mechanisms through which individuals apprehend risk, including their emotional appraisals of putatively dangerous activities, their comprehension and retention of empirical information, and their disposition to trust competing sources of risk information. As a result, individuals effectively conform their beliefs about risk to their visions of an ideal society. This phenomenon — which we propose to call “cultural cognition” — not only helps explain why members of the public so often disagree with experts about matters as diverse as global warming, gun control, the spread of HIV through casual contact, and the health consequences of obtaining an abortion; it also explains why experts themselves so often disagree about these matters and why political conflict over them is so intense.

The phenomenon of cultural cognition underwrites a strong critique of the analysis that Sunstein presents in Laws of Fear. Once the influence of culture is taken into account, what Sunstein sees as public hysteria is often revealed to be a complex form of status competition between the adherents of competing cultural visions. This reformulation of public risk sensibilities, in turn, undermines much of Sunstein’s normative account of how the law should respond to public risk perceptions. Because citizens’ fears express their cultural visions of how society should be organized, the line between “considered values” and “irrational fears” often proves illusory. Reliance on expert cost-benefit analysis, in these circumstances, becomes less a strategy for rationally implementing public values than a device for strategically avoiding political disputes over individual virtue and collective justice.

Unfortunately, though, it’s not clear that incorporating cultural cognition into the science of risk perception reduces the complexity of reconciling rational risk regulation with democratic decisionmaking. A theory of risk perception that incorporates cultural cognition is teeming with insights on how to structure risk communication; by linking risk perception to cultural values, it identifies myriad new strategies for managing public impressions of what risks are real and what risk-mitigation strategies are effective. But at the same time that such a theory makes the prescriptive dimension of risk regulation more tractable, it makes the normative dimension considerably harder to assess. If risk disputes are really disputes over the good life, then the challenge that risk regulation poses for democracy is less how to reconcile public sensibilities with science than how to accommodate diverse visions of the good within a popular system of regulation. Fear itself may indeed be what democratic societies, or at least pluralistic ones, most have to fear — not because governmental responses to risk are likely to be irrational, but because risk regulation is inherently fraught with the potential for illiberality.

We develop this response to Sunstein’s Laws of Fear in four Parts. In Part I, we explicate Sunstein’s account. Sunstein’s theory is best understood within the context of a debate over two competing models of risk perception — one that sees individuals as rational weighers of risk and another that sees them as irrational weighers.

In Part II, we examine the dynamic that Sunstein’s account overlooks: cultural cognition. We show how cultural cognition supports a distinct model of risk perception — one in which individuals behave neither as rational nor irrational weighers but rather as cultural evaluators of risk. In Part III, we use this model to challenge the central positive, normative, and prescriptive components of Sunstein’s account.

Finally, in Part IV, we examine what the cultural-evaluator model of risk perception reveals about the tension between risk regulation and liberalism. Surprisingly, one response to this tension might be to base policymaking on an irrational-weigher theory such as Sunstein’s, precisely because that model overlooks the cultural underpinnings of public risk perceptions.