Sustainable Democracy - A Conference Proposal

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The project provides support for a conference on Sustainable Democracy, to be held at the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University. The conference is designed to focus attention on new techniques and theories as they relate to a canonical question: what factors sustain democracy? The conference revisits a crucial set of democratic institutions, those that define majority rule decision-making processes, as they interact with social, economic, demographic, geographic, and cultural factors that can influence the outcomes of group decisions, from legislatures to local community groups. The intellectual merit of this proposal arises from its interdisciplinary linkage of studies of democratic decision-making in different contexts, from new or consolidating systems to established democracies and self-governing systems, by characterizing factors that shape processes and outcomes in a wide range of working democracies. This conference seeks to create linkages that work in both directions, borrowing from other disciplines to characterize the forces that shape individual preferences and other contextual factors, and providing insights about democratic processes that contribute to other disciplines, such as an improved ability to predict outcomes in Social-Ecological Systems (SES). The broader impact of this conference lies in its role as a first step in a new research program aimed at linking the analysis of a wide range of democratic systems. The goal is to move toward an interdisciplinary linkage of studies of democratic decision-making in different contexts, from new or consolidating systems to established democracies and self-governing systems, by characterizing factors that shape processes and outcomes in a wide range of working democracies. To these ends, conference proceedings juxtapose theory and empirics, exploring how the variation in democratic institutions and outcomes can be explained by the micro-foundations of democracy: the preferences held by decision-makers, their resulting incentives to cooperate and coordinate, and the political institutions in which these behaviors take place. Twelve outside scholars from a variety and disciplines, including Anthropology, Economics, and Geography. The conference also initiates a new research and training agenda at the Workshop, one that builds on its strengths and extends its focus. A second priority is to formulate a plan for new graduate, undergraduate, and practitioner training programs at the Workshop and elsewhere at IU based on this research program. These initiatives will be the subject of near-term training by the investigators working with other scholars. Finally, theories developed from the conference should provide some guidance to policymakers seeking more effective means of democratic decision-making.