Working Papers

Democracy and Systemic Risk: Current and Future Challenges 

DERISK Research Note #1

Abstract: With phenomena such as climate change and global pandemics looming large in our collective vision, problems of “systemic risk” are becoming increasingly central to today’s politics. Systemic risks are large-scale risks that arise at the level of social systems from the complex interaction of thousands or millions of individual decisions. The concept of systemic risk has attracted increasing attention from a variety of perspectives (Centeno et al., 2015; Gambhir et al., 2025; Renn et al., 2019; Renn, 2021; Schweizer, 2021; Schweizer and Juhola, 2024; Schweizer and Renn, 2019; Sillmann et al., 2022). Most of these focus on conceptualising and measuring systemic risk. More recently, there is additional focus on how to regulate and respond to systemic risk. Yet in these debates, there is less attention to the implications of systemic risk for democracy. In this note, we outline a research agenda to conceptualise the implications of systemic risk for democracy as well as provide guidance for a more inclusive, egalitarian response to these emergent risks.