Indiana University

From the Indiana Democracy Consortium

Indiana Democracy Consortium

Indiana University departments, schools and centers asking why some democracies succeed and others fail

Staff of the Consortium

Jeffrey C. Isaac (Director)
James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science

isaac@indiana.edu, Web site

Professor Isaac's research interests center around political theory, broadly understood. His most recent book, The Poverty of Progressivism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), is an interpretive essay on the decline of liberal progressive politics in the United States. Democracy in Dark Times (Cornell, 1998) offers an interpretation-- influenced heavily by the writings of Hannah Arendt-- of the fate of democratic impulses in the wake of the Eastern European revolutions of 1989. Arendt, Camus and Modern Rebellion (Yale, 1992) is a comparison of the writings of Hannah Arendt and Albert Camus, which seeks both to read these authors in light of their historical contexts and to underscore their contemporary relevance. In these books, Professor Isaac explores the possibilities and limits of radical democratic political agency in the contemporary world.

Professor Isaac has written extensively on the political thought of Hannah Arendt, in the books noted above, and also in such periodicals as Political Theory, American Political Science Review, Social Research, Praxis International, and Tikkun. He has also written extensively on the political thought of anti-communist dissidence, in Social Research, East European Politics and Societies, Common Knowledge, and a number of anthologies; on the concept of power, and the philosophy of social science, central themes of his first book, Power and Marxist Theory: A Realist View (Cornell, 1987); and on the themes of democracy and pragmatism.

Professor Isaac is currently working on the topic of twentieth century liberal political thought, and the meanings of liberalism in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. He is also editing a new edition of The Communist Manifesto for Yale University Press's "Rethinking the Western Tradition" series. Professor Isaac is a frequent contributor to Dissent magazine, where he writes about ethics and politics and the history and future of the left. He serves on the editorial boards of Polity and Dissent, and as an editorial associate of Constellations. He is serving his fifth year as chair of the Department of Political Science. He is also the Book Review Editor of Perspectives on Politics, and thus edits the official book review of the American Political Science Association.

Here is a short list of Professor Isaac's representative publications:

Bob Ivie
Department of Communication and Culture

rivie@indiana.edu, Web site

Professor Ivie teaches in IU’s Communication and Culture Department. His research interests focus on rhetoric as a mode of political critique and cultural production, with an emphasis on democracy and war. He is the founding editor of the journal Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, and has served as an editor and member of editorial boards of many other communication journals. He served as the Department chair until 2003, and was awarded a fellowship by the Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions at Indiana University to attend the Interdisciplinary Faculty Seminar on Democracy and Dissent in 2003.

Professor Ivie is the author of numerous articles and books, including Dissent from War (Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, 2007), Democracy and America's War on Terror. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), "Democratizing for Peace." (Rhetoric and Public Affairs 2001) and "Prologue to Democratic Dissent in America." (Javnost/The Public 2004).

Here is a short list of Professor Ivie's representative publications:

Regina Smyth
Department of Political Science

rsmyth@indiana.edu, Web site

Professor Smyth's research explores the relationship between democratic development and electoral competition by focusing on candidates, political parties and party systems in post-Communist states. Her work is based on original data collection that has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Smith Richardson Foundation, and the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research. Her book Candidate Strategies and Electoral Competition in the Russian Federation: Democracy without Foundation (Cambridge 2006) explains the failure of Russian democracy in terms of the factors that impeded cooperation among candidates and party leaders and failed to produce a viable opposition to the ruling party. Her study of Russian party organizations examines the inability of parties' to articulate coherent policy positions or frame policy debates. Her current work on party and party system consolidation across the post-Communist states examines the processes that produce congruence between key political alignments or power centers and partisan competition. Professor Smyth's work has been published in Politics and Society, Comparative Politics, and Comparative Political Studies. Her teaching interests extend from her research. She has taught courses on Russian and Soviet Politics, Democracy and Elections, Comparative Democratic Institutions, Comparative Parties and Party Systems, Voter Turnout, and West European Politics. She has taught at Penn State University and Harvard University before coming to Indiana University in 2006.

Here is a short list of Professor Smyth's representative publications:

Christiana Ochoa
School of Law

cochoa@indiana.edu, Web site

Before joining the faculty in 2003, Professor Ochoa was an associate in the Banking and Finance Group at the New York office of the global law firm, Clifford Chance, where she dedicated her efforts to cross-border capital markets and asset-backed finance transactions. Ochoa has also worked for a number of human rights and non-governmental organizations in Colombia, Brazil, and Nicaragua. She has lived for extended periods in Latin America and has significant academic and other work experience in that region.

Ochoa's scholarship focuses on global governance and human rights. Her work has been published in the Harvard International Law Journal, the Virginia Journal of International Law, the Indiana Law Journal (forthcoming 2008) and the Human Rights Quarterly, among others. Her research concentrates in two inter-connected areas: the role of individuals in law-formation and the inextricable links between global economic activity and human rights. The first of these concentrations explores the relationship between the evolving role of individuals in global governance and under international law and the doctrinal role of individuals in international law formation. Ochoa's more recent work in this area examines the individual's participation in law formation and in civil society as means to increasing the democratic legitimacy of international law and global governance mechanisms. Her work on global economic activity and human rights has included the development of what she terms the Odious Finance Doctrine as well as inquiries into the complex interconnections between the proliferation of finance tools and human rights.

Here is a short list of Professor Ochoa's representative publications:

Lauren K. Robel
Dean and Val Nolan Professor of Law at the School of Law

lrobel@indiana.edu, Web site

Lauren Robel is Dean of the IU School of Law and the Val Nolan Professor of Law. Dean Robel's research has focused on the federal courts. Her articles have appeared in numerous leading law journals. She is a frequent speaker on topics ranging from procedural reform to sovereign immunity and co-author of Federal Courts: Cases and Materials on Judicial Federalism and the Lawyering Process (LEXISNEXIS 2005), a casebook on federal jurisdiction written with Arthur Hellman.

Robel has also served as a visiting faculty member at Université Panthéon-Assas (Paris II), where she published a book, Les états des Noirs, Fédéralisme et question raciale aux États-Unis, (Presses Universitaires de France, 2000), with Professor Elisabeth Zoller, a frequent visitor to the Law School.

She also serves as a member of the Rules Advisory Committee for the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

David Williams
John Hastings Professor of Law at the School of Law

dacwilli@indiana.edu, Web site

A noted constitutional law scholar, Professor Williams holds the John Hastings Chair and has written numerous articles in major journals throughout the country. He is a popular lecturer on Native American people and on the Second Amendment. Winner of the Wallace Teaching Award, Professor Williams teaches Constitutional Law and Native American Law.

In recent years, his research has focused on two aspects of constitutional law: the right of Native American tribes to self-government within the American constitutional system, and the alleged constitutional right of the people to keep and bear arms in order to make revolution against government. These two seemingly unrelated topics raise the common theme of examining the possibility of popular government outside the normal channels of state and federal elections, and more specifically the claimed right of an "organic" people to resist the encroachment of an "alien" government.

Professor Williams' book The Mythic Meanings of the Second Amendment: Taming Political Violence in a Constitutional Republic, has recently been published by Yale University Press.

Here is a short list of Professor William's representative publications:

Matt Auer
School of Public and Environmental Affairs

mauer@indiana.edu, Web site

Dr. Auer is professor and director of undergraduate programs at the School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University. He is also editor-in-chief of the public policy journal, Policy Sciences.

Dr. Auer has published more than 40 refereed articles and book chapters in the arenas of environmental policy, sustainable development, and foreign aid. In 2004, he published the edited volume, Restoring Cursed Earth: Appraising Environmental Policy Reforms in Eastern Europe and Russia (Rowman & Littlefield Press). He is also a frequent commentator on environmental issues. His opinions have been published in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Miami Herald, and Atlanta Journal-Constitution, among other news outlets.

Between 2001 and 2005, Dr. Auer served on the U.S. delegation to the United Nations Forum on Forests. At the U.N., he negotiated global-scale, legally non-binding arrangements governing aid for the forest sector. He also represented the U.S. Forest Service in helping develop the President’s Initiative against Illegal Logging – a multi-year, multi-million dollar strategy to combat illegal harvesting of timber products and corruption in the forest sector in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

Dr. Auer has earned more than ten teaching awards at Indiana University, including the President’s Award for Teaching Excellence.

Dr. Auer earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University in biological anthropology, a master of arts in law and diplomacy from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, and a Ph.D. in forestry and environmental studies from Yale University.

Here is a short list of Professor Auer's representative publications:

Bill Scheuerman
Department of Political Science

wscheuer@indiana.edu, Web site

Bill Scheuerman's primary research and teaching interests are in modern political thought, German political thought, democratic theory, legal theory, and normative international theory. He is the author of Between the Norm and the Exception: The Frankfurt School and the Rule of Law (MIT, 1994), Carl Schmitt: The End of Law (Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), Liberal Democracy and the Social Acceleration of Time (Johns Hopkins, 2004), and editor of a number of others. Bill has published in many professional journals, and he is co-director of an annual international conference for critical theorists held in Prague.

Here is a short list of Professor Scheuerman's representative publications:

Archana Sridhar
Assistant Dean for Research and Special Projects at the School of Law

asridhar@indiana.edu, Web site

Archana Sridhar joined the Law School after completing a year-long U.S. Student Fulbright Fellowship in Guatemala, studying tax reform and nonprofit law. Prior to that, Ms. Sridhar worked in foundation and corporate relations for an international humanitarian organization and as a tax associate at Sullivan & Worcester LLP, specializing in tax-exempt organizations and corporate transactions.

As a law student, she participated in a number of student groups, including the South Asian Law Students Association, and pursued clinical work with the Harvard Civil Rights Project. She also worked as a Technical Research Assistant at the HLS library.

Ms. Sridhar's own continued research addresses international philanthropy, post-conflict development, and tax reform. Her scholarship includes Análisis de los Procesos Administrativo y Penal en Casos de Evasión Tributaria en Guatemala, Centro Internacional para Investigaciones en Derechos Humanos, (with José Ricardo Barrientos), a 2002 article in the Berkeley Journal of International Law and "Tax Reform and Promoting a Culture of Philanthropy: Guatemala’s "Third Sector" in an Era of Peace" in the Fordham International Law Journal.

Brian Shoup (Associate Director)
Department of Political Science

bshoup@indiana.edu

Brian Shoup received his Ph.D. from IU in 2007. His research focuses on ethnic identity, state-building, and nationalism. His first book, Conflict and Cooperation in Multiethnic States: Institutional Incentives, Myths and Counterbalancing (Routledge, 2008), examines how electoral rules and redistributive programs can constrain or exacerbate ethnic violence in plural states. He has conducted fieldwork in Fiji, Malaysia and South Africa. He also co-edited a volume with Sumit Ganguly and Andrew Scobell, US-India Strategic Cooperation Into the 21st Century: More Than Words (Routledge, 2006) and his work has appeared in the Journal of Democracy.

Here is a short list of Dr. Shoup's representative publications:

Staff and Affiliations

Recent News from the IDC

  • The Citizens' Assembly

    John Ferejohn discusses issues of direct democracy more >

  • A Minority Report

    Milica Matijevic and Tim Waters discuss "A Minority Report." more >

  • Lt. Col. Doug Ollivant

    IU Ph.D. and Army officer Doug Ollivant discusses state-building in Iraq. more >

  • Kosovo: Endgame or Renewed Crisis

    IDC scholars look at the recent elections in Kosovo and what they mean for the Balkans. more >

  • Social Context and the
    Process of National Reconciliation

    Scholars examine the legacies of national reconciliation efforts in Eastern Europe, Latin America and Southern Africa. Read a complete report.

  • Democracy and the Modern World:
    Prospects and Challenges

    Read a complete report.
Indiana Democracy Consortium
Bloomington, Indiana

Block IU © Copyright by the Indiana University Board of Trustees