ABSTRACT
The advent of the digital revolution has also dramatically changed the way in which the most traditional form of PRA – that is, the elicitation of expert opinion – takes place. Researchers from RAND Corporation for instance recently developed ExpertLens, an online system – grounded in the literature on Delphi and NGT techniques – that gathers and analyzes expert opinion (Dalal et al., 2011) – the innovative aspect of such system being that it reduces the costs traditionally associated with the use of expert panels by exploiting through its functionalities the wisdom of a ‘selected crowd’ made of non-collocated experts. To provide another example, the GJP described in Chapter 4 was also based on a web platform designed to produce crowd-sourced forecasts: by relying on such a platform, the project was able to show how talented individuals without specialized subject-matter knowledge could provide calibrated and accurate probability estimations about political events by drawing information from the web, while ‘superforecaster’ teams were formed and worked together online without meeting in person. In summary, it is safe to say that the digital revolution had a twofold effect on political risks, in the sense that it had an impact both from the substantial and from the methodological standpoint: on the one hand, as further illustrated in Section 2, it created new risks and magnified some that already existed; on the other hand, as shown in Section 3, with the emergence of ‘big data’ analysis and new techniques connected to the diffusion of social networks, such as sentiment analysis, the digital revolution also enriched the PR analyst’s toolkit with new instruments and solutions for the identification and assessment of sociopolitical hazards.
