Susan Ostermann

Biography & Research

Susan L. Ostermann is associate professor of global affairs and political science at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame and a core-affiliated faculty member of the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies.

Employing both quantitative and qualitative methodology, Ostermann seeks to understand the relationship between state capacity, coercion and law. Why do we sometimes see compliance with regulations in places where the state is coercively weak and actors, be they individuals or organizations, have strong incentives to break the law? Her book "Capacity beyond Coercion: Regulatory Pragmatism and Compliance along the India-Nepal Border" (Oxford University Press) develops the concept of regulatory pragmatism to explain variation in strategies used by both the Nepali and Indian states to secure compliance with conservation, education and child labor regulations under challenging conditions.

More recent work explores compliance with anti-female genital mutilation or cutting law under conditions of low state coercive capacity in Burkina Faso, Mali and Kenya. Her next project seeks to understand why capable states sometimes choose not to monopolize violence.

While Professor Ostermann’s research focuses mainly on regulatory compliance in South Asia, she is broadly interested in understanding laws and norms and how they change and interact. Towards this end, she has published papers on inter-caste marriage and the role of skin color in Indian politics. She has also published work on the historical roots of conservatism in Indian political thought, the development and expansion of the Indian Election Commission, variation in sex-ratios throughout the subcontinent, the Indian bureaucracy, state capacity in South Asia and the 2014 Indian general election. Ostermann’s work has been published in Law & Society Review, Governance, Asian Survey, Studies in Comparative International Development, the Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics, Studies in Indian Politics and Law & Policy.

Ostermann holds a Ph.D. from the Travers Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. She also holds a law degree from Stanford Law School and worked for several years as a practicing litigator, focusing on class actions and intellectual property disputes.

Recent Work

• Policy brief: States can increase legal compliance by embracing regulatory pragmatism
• Liu Institute Justice and Asia grant recipient for the project “Internal Democratization: Explaining the 2018 Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) Merger in Pakistan”

Courses

• Global Politics & Policy  (undergraduate global affairs course)
• Democracy in Modern South Asia 

News & Media

• "Political scientists: Why the US should consider making voting compulsory" (Chicago Tribune)
• "Susan Ostermann named Liu Institute Director, starting July 1"
• "Notre Dame professor's research on housing finds an audience in Alaska"
• "Lessons from Lahaina for Los Angeles" (Daily Bulletin, Pasadena Star-News)
• "Disaster survivors want to rebuild safer, more sustainable homes, but cost misperceptions often stand in the way" (Houston Chronicle, San Francisco Chronice, Fast Company & others)
• "As Maui rebuilds, Notre Dame research team contributes expertise on hazard-resilient housing"
• "Researcher to examine housing resilience and regulation following Maui wildfires"