Sustainable Democracy - A Conference Proposal

该项目为将在印第安纳州大学政治理论和政策分析研讨会上举行的可持续民主会议提供支持。会议旨在关注新技术和新理论，因为它们与一个典型的问题有关：什么因素维持民主？会议重新审视了一套关键的民主制度，这些制度定义了多数人统治的决策过程，因为它们与社会，经济，人口，地理和文化因素相互作用，这些因素可以影响从立法机构到地方社区团体的群体决策的结果。这一建议的学术价值在于，它通过描述在广泛的民主运作中形成进程和结果的因素，将不同背景下的民主决策研究（从新的或巩固中的制度到已建立的民主政体和自治制度）联系起来。本次会议旨在建立双向工作的联系，借鉴其他学科来描述塑造个人偏好和其他背景因素的力量，并提供有关有助于其他学科的民主进程的见解，例如提高预测社会生态系统（SES）结果的能力。这次会议的更广泛的影响在于它作为一个新的研究计划的第一步，旨在将对广泛的民主制度的分析联系起来。我们的目标是走向民主决策的研究在不同的背景下，从新的或巩固的系统，以建立民主和自治系统的跨学科联系，通过表征的因素，在广泛的民主工作的过程和结果。 为了这些目的，会议记录并列理论和政治学，探讨如何在民主制度和结果的变化可以由民主的微观基础解释：决策者持有的偏好，他们由此产生的激励合作和协调，以及这些行为发生的政治机构。 12名来自不同学科的外部学者，包括人类学，经济学和地理学。 会议还在讲习班上启动了一个新的研究和培训议程，该议程将加强其优势并扩大其重点。第二个优先事项是制定新的研究生，本科生和从业人员培训计划在车间和其他地方在IU基于本研究计划的计划。这些举措将成为调查人员与其他学者合作进行的近期培训的主题。 最后，会议发展的理论应该为寻求更有效的民主决策手段的决策者提供一些指导。

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.