The conference is designed to focus attention on new techniques and theories as they relate to a canonical question: what factors sustain democracy? We propose to revisit 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. Building on the enormous research accomplishments of the Workshop’s co-founders, Lin and Vincent Ostrom, we are committed to a conference and a larger research program that is fundamentally interdisciplinary, focused on explaining real-world outcomes using a combination of theory, quantitative and qualitative analysis, and fieldwork. About 18 social scientists (spanning Anthropology, Economics, Geography, Law, Political Science, and Sociology) from outside IU will be attending. The conference is funded through the generous support of the National Science Foundation, the Bureau of Social Science Research at Indiana University, the IU College of Arts and Sciences, and the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis.
The conference is also designed as the first step in the development of a new interdisciplinary research and training program at IU aimed at linking the analysis of a wide range of democratic systems – newly-established democracies, established systems, and self-governance situations. Our goal is to develop an undergraduate and graduate training program that is truly interdisciplinary, that builds on IU’s strength in social science and in areas studies to address important questions of democratic sustainability in new ways. The Workshop provides a natural venue and framework for this collaboration. We intend to build on this foundation by attracting a wide range of research interests and methodologies into the project from throughout IU.