Black Swans in Public Administration:·Rare Organizational Failure wlth Severe Consequences

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Wolfgang Seibel
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: from 2017 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 329566223

The subject of the present proposal is organizational failure in public administration with severe consequences for the physical integrity of humans. it is especially innovative through addressing the asymmetry between the rarity of the respective incidences and the seriousness of their consequences under the condition of professional administration in rule-of-law based democracies where systems failure and ill-conceived decisions resulting in threats to, or even loss of, human lives are extremely rare events. However, given the drastic consequences of such failure, these rare events cannot be treated like negligible statistical outliers (cf., referring to K. R. Popper's [1959] Black Swan metaphor of faisifiability, Taleb 2007). They require systematic analyses none of which, however, has been undertaken so far. The particular risks of the project reside in the restricted accessibility to actors involved in the relevant disasters who, at the same time, may be indispensable human sources for the investigation itself. Also, the heterogeneity of sources across various cases may reduce the replicability of the study. The research objective is the analysis of regular patterns of failure across various fields of public administration, the test of hypothesis on general causal mechanisms and a contribution to the theoretical debate on pragmatism and the ethic of responsibility in public administration.

• DFG Programme: Reinhart Koselleck Projects