The Center for the Study of Democracy sponsors research conferences on reform of democratic institutions and practices, democratic transitions, and other themes related to CSD's research foci in social movements, race and ethnicity, and the economics of governance. Most of these conferences result in edited volumes.

Sometimes we co-sponsor such conferences with other research centers both at UCI and elsewhere. For example, CSD co-sponsored a 2008-9 conference at UCI on Race and Ethnicity with the Politics of Race, Immigration, and Ethnicity Consortium (PRIEC), in 2004-5 we sponsored a conference with the USC Initiative and Referendum Institute, that resulted in an edited volume (S. Bowler and A. Glazer, eds. Direct Democracy's Impact on American Political Institutions. Palgrave Macillian, 2008).

Also, CSD has begun running what we are referring to as “bi-coastal” and "bi-continental" conferences. The first of these was co-organized with the University of Montreal, with one conference at UCI and a follow-up conference at the University of Montreal, with the two parts put together to form an edited book, Duverger's Law of Plurality Elections: Evidence from Canada, India, the United Kingdom and the U.S. that was published by Springer-Verlag in 2008. A second bi-coastal conference, co-organized with faculty from Yale University, was held in fall 2009 at UCI, on "1989: The Fall of the Wall and Tianmen Square, Twenty Years Later," with a planned conference volume to result. A two-part bi-continental conference was held at UCI (in 2008) and the University of Bologna (in 2009) resulting in a jointly edited book A Natural Experiment on Electoral Law Reform: Evaluating the Long Run Consequences of 1990s Electoral Reform in Italy and Japan. (Springer, 2011) . Another bi-continental conference, with the first part in Luneburg, Germany and the second part at UCI in 2011, was run celebrating the World Values Survey. Those conferences, too, are expected to result in a combined conference volume, a Festschrift volume for Ronald Inglehart, the Survey's founder.