Can We Know Whether a Policy is (not) Proportionate?

Public policies are required to balance between a range of interests and values. One particularly important principle for evaluating the proportionality of policies is the legal principle of proportionality. This principle is one of the most prominent legal principles in the internal legal systems of many countries, as well as in international law. However, despite its prominent standing legal proportionality has not been empirically studied, and thus we do not know whether it indeed provides a method for evaluating disproportionate policies. Only recently has proportionality judgments, conducted by experts, become a subject of empirical analysis (Sulitzeanu-Kenan et al. 2014, Sulitzeanu-Kenan & Statman 2014). These studies provide preliminary findings regarding the sensitivity of such judgments to factual variation, their susceptibility to motivational biases, and their reliability (inter-expert agreement). The paper thus evaluates the utility of this procedure against an alternative social-psychological measure of integrative complexity (Suedfeld & Tetlock 2014), to assess the potential and reliability of ex-ante and ex-post evaluations of disproportionate policy. This proposal addresses the workshop's first and seventh questions: The extent to which subjective evaluations "are able to capture the extent of non-proportionate policy response"; and the "significant normative dimensions of policy over – and underreaction".