Political decisions and public risk perception

Abstract

Should the public's risk perception be an input into political and administrative decision making? It is clear that it does have an influence, but perhaps not to the extent of explaining all, or even most, of the tremendous inconsistencies in the allocation of resources for risk mitigation. Risk perception models could be of help to understand such phenomena, but contemporary models of risk perception have been misleading and their weaknesses are discussed. Similarly, experts' risk perception has been asserted to be very different from that of the public but that is argued here to be a mistaken opinion. Should we let the experts run risk policy? Several arguments against this idea are put forward here, the most important being that the whole issue is one of democracy. Those who are unhappy about the decisions made by the government can always argue their case and maybe gain political power to change things. This is as true of risk policy as it is of everything else.