The Working Group the Political Economy of Sustainable Democracy sponsors and coordinates research and training on the microfoundations of sustainable democracy, defined as a commitment to democratic processes, respect for election outcomes, and linkages that engender responsiveness and accountability. The goal is to move towards interdisciplinary 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.

These goals extend both the substantive focus and the methodological pluralism that is the hallmark of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis. The choiceto invoke the concept of sustainability or robustness is deliberate and intended to resonate with the Workshop’s leadership in the study of when individuals are likely to coordination behavior to secure common pool resources. We ask when and under what conditions are citizens of democratic regimes—new and old—likely to coordinate to work together to build majorities in order to pursue shared goals.

The Workshop’s focus on complexity also reminds us that generating democratic sustainability is not just a function of good constitutional choice. As Vincent Ostrom has argued, a deep and nuanced understanding of individual preferences, groups, and competing social, economic political structures that are equally important for shaping outcomes from majority rule decision-making. Our goal is to build on the interdisciplinary and area studies expertise present on campus to build a better understanding of the basic building blocks of democratic states.

Like most of the Workshop’s research programs, our work on sustainable democracy starts with a simple observation: all democracies much rest on majority rule but constructing governing majorities is not always a straightforward proposition. In some cases, solving the coordination and social choice dilemmas inherent in majority rule decision-making processes will be easy and the solutions will be both robust and consistent with constitutional order. However, in other cases marked by differentstructures of preferences among the electorate and the legislators, building majorities will be difficult if not impossible. In these cases, leaders will facestrong incentives to defect from the constitutional order and construct majorities through restriction or coercion. They may exit the formal structure and rely on informal institutions that not only compete with formal structures but are at odds with them. Their willingness to do so is likely to be contingent on the state’s ability to constrain anti-democratic action. Thus, rather than conflate majority rule with constitutional order, we try to understand how the two interact.

The foundation of the Workshop has been its reliance on diverse approaches and methods is also an important model for the Working Group. Our initial focus on majority rule enables us to deploy a new technology, the uncovered set, to describe the potential set of outcomes that might emerge from majority rule decision making processes.Relying on the uncovered set technology we can measure how much influence a group or collection of individuals—including political parties, social groups, andethnic groups—have over the policy space, whether or not mass and elite policy preferences are congruent.

Finally, the Workshop reminds us that our scholarly work has important implications for solving real world problems. Again, the complex nature of the problems we face is fundamental to successful policy recommendations. More than three decades before the World Bank’s dramatic conclusions, the foundational work of the Ostroms’ in bothmunicipal governance and in political development stressed that there is no such thing as “best practices” but rather a need to understand how contextual differences—complexity—demands an appropriate response.