Ostrom Contribution to Political Economy. Bish. 20143

Vincent Ostroms Contributions toPolitical Economy

Robert L. Bish*

*University of Victoria and Tulo Centre of Indigenous Economics; [email protected]

This article describesVincent Ostroms work on water resources and local government prior to the

time he began to refer to himself as a political economist within public choice theory. He then

returned to the work of Hamilton, Madison, andTocqueville with a new perspective and produced

two classics: The Political Theory of a Compound Republic and The Intellectual Crisis in American

Public Administration. He helped restore the importance of federalism, including an expanded

theory of federalism away from levels of government to operational and constitutional-choice

rules for different governments, including local governments. Based on this work, he and his wife

and colleague, Elinor LinOstrom, developed theory and empirical work that led to Elinor receiving

the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2009.

Vincent Ostrom was one of the most consequential political economists of the

twentieth century. Between 1961 and 1973, he published work that changed the

way many scholars think about governing water resources and metropolitan areas,

gave new life to the importance of federalism, and challenged mainstream public

administration while restoring an approach to political science based on the

political theories of Thomas Hobbes, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and

Alexis de Tocqueville. He simultaneously nested the restored approach in

contemporary public choice and political economy. His work and the work of his

wife, Elinor, made significant contributions to our understanding of complex

systems of governance.

In this article, I will describe the development of Vincents most important

contributions and how his work in different areas came together in an integrated

multidisciplinary approach to provide much of the framework for Elinors

empirical work. These contributions and their joint theory building resulted in her

receiving the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2009. My perspective is that of

an economist who is also a former student, coauthor, and colleague who studied

and worked with Vincent during the time the ideas behind his major contributions

came together. Vincent and Lin published many books, chapters, and articles, as

did the students and colleagues who worked with them and participated in joint

Publius:TheJournal of Federalism volume 44 number 2, pp. 227^248doi:10.1093/publius/pjt041AdvanceAccess publication December15, 2013 TheAuthor 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of CSFAssociates: Publius, Inc.All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected]

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research projects. Only a few of their publications are cited in this review. Lists of

publications by Vincent, Elinor and colleagues who worked with them are

contained on the web site at The Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political

Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University (http://www.indiana.edu/

workshop/).1The work Vincent did immediately before he joined Indiana University in 1964

was critical for his understanding of complex systems, markets, and federalism

theories. It was also after completion of a 1967 Public Choice Theory seminar,

taught with economist Herbert Kiesling, that he began to refer to himself as a

political economist, a label he also gave to Hamilton, Madison, and Tocqueville,

and that he described as in the sense of using economic assumptions to reason

about the human condition and about the effect that political regimes would have

upon the capacity of people to advance their self-interest rightly understood

(V. Ostrom 1971a, 7). Vincent and Elinors work also evolved to have significant

differences from what became mainstream public choice theory.

Water Resources

Vincent described his graduate work as being in classic public administration.

At that time, the work of Luther Gulick (Gulick and Urwick 1937) was prominent,

as was POBSCORB.2 However, Vincents dissertation, Water and Politics

(V. Ostrom 1953), was part of a Haynes Foundation series of public sector

industry studies. A public sector industry comprises all of the organizations,

government or private, which provide, regulate, or produce a public function such

as policing or allocating a natural resource such as water. The public sector

industry approach provided Vincent with the importance of understanding the

relationships among the public and private organizations that interacted to produce

public services and was a fundamentally different perspective from the classic

public administration model of a bureaucracy. The industry approach also differed

from the concept of a market in packageable goods as taught in mainstream

economics because the notion of a public sector industry mixed governments

and private organizations and treated packageable goods, public goods and

commons resources.

Vincent had also chosen an extremely complex function. Water has a

multiplicity of uses ranging from in-channel recreation, navigation, and pollution

disposal to out-of-channel agricultural, industrial, and domestic uses. Furthermore,

in California, the institutional arrangements included a variety of public and

private enterprises functioning within multiple legal systems: Spanish civil law,

common law, state constitutional, and statutory law, federal constitutional and

statutory law, and state and federal court interpretations of those laws. Vincent

could not have begun his public administration research in a more complex area

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of the public sector where classic public administration theory was useless. The

non-packageability of the resource also made a simple market approach

inappropriate. The industry approach filled the gap between bureaucracy and

markets. Vincent went on to develop a detailed understanding and description

of the California water industry (V. Ostrom 1971b), including detail on the

organization and operation of the states 4,500 water organizations and the laws,

including court decisions, governing them.

Vincent contributed in other areas too. He valued his practical work drafting the

Alaska Constitutions provisions on natural resources, while also publishing

excellent, but traditional, academic articles. An intellectual problem arose, however,

when he participated with Joe Bain, Richard Caves, and Julius Margolis on a study

of the California water industry sponsored by Resources for the Future (RFF) in

the early 1960s. As traditional industrial-organization economists, Bain, Caves,

and Margolis looked at the complexity and recommended a regulatory agency to

oversee the system. Vincent dissented because he appreciated the entrepreneurship

within the system that had allowed millions of people to live in a desert. He saw no

evidence that a regulatory agency could oversee such a complex system. His dissent

was not included in the final RFF report (Bain, Caves, and Margolis 1966).

The experience did, however, increase his awareness that within economics there

was a paradigm difference between economists who, upon seeing a market

failure, recommended an ethical observer solution by government and

economists who looked toward the dynamics of markets and complex systems to

resolve such issues. He came back to this paradigm difference many times. It was

very important in both The Political Theory of a Compound Republic (V. Ostrom

1971a) and the specific focus of his The Intellectual Crisis in American Public

Administration (V. Ostrom 1973). His Water Resource Development: Some

Problems in Economic and Political Analysis of Public Policy (V. Ostrom 1968)

provides an outstanding analysis of the specific kinds of incentives faced by

different kinds of organizations within the water industry that prevent it from

functioning like the economists model of a purely competitive market. It also

provides an analysis of how the dynamics of polycentric governance are likely to

outperform any single-sovereign approach to governance. Vincent used the term

polycentric to describe systems where different organizations have independent

jurisdiction in contrast to decentralization, where a hierarchical source was

assumed. He first used this term in his comparison of Gargantua and polycentric

approaches to organizing metropolitan government (V. Ostrom, Tiebout, and

Warren, 1961). His The Choice of Institutional Arrangements for Water Resource

Development (V. Ostrom 1971b) puts his RFF study work into the context of public

choice theory.

While Vincents water resources work was not widely read, it was very important

for his intellectual development and was carried on by his students from UCLA and

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Indiana. These analyses include books by Bish, Warren, and Weschler on Puget

Sound (Bish et al. 1975; Bish 1981) and Mark Sproule-Jones on the Great Lakes

(1993, 2002). Most important, however, was his initial supervision of Elinor

Ostroms dissertation at UCLA. Elinors dissertation, Public Entrepreneurship:

A Case Study in Ground Water Basin Management (E. Ostrom 1965), was a study of

the bottoms-up evolution of a constitution for the governance of the ground water

basin underlying the city of Los Angeles and adjacent municipalities. In addition to

the detailed empirical work, it integrated the emerging public choice literature,

including Buchanan and Tullocks Calculus of Consent, with Vincents industry

approach so both private and government organizations were included. Combining

the public choice theories of the nature of goods and resources, differentiating

between constitutional and operational decision rules, and applying the concepts to

real-world resource use situations were the defining characteristic of her future

work for which she received the Nobel Prize in Economics. Following completion

of her dissertation, however, she joined Vincent with research on local

governments, which in turn led to her policing studies before she returned to

focus on natural resource problems.

Local Governments

Vincent had conducted research on education and local government at the

Universities of Wyoming and Oregon, but his major work on local governments

began when he took over responsibility for the Metropolitan Study of Los Angeles

when John Bollens went on leave from UCLA in 1957. Robert Warren had

completed his PhD exams in political science and his dissertation was to be based

on the study. The expectation when the study began was that the conclusion would

be that the municipalities in Los Angeles County should be merged with the

Los Angeles County government to become an integrated county-city like San

Francisco. The study recommendation would fit the then-common diagnosis that

there were too many governments in metropolitan areas and that consolidation

into one government would be less expensive and provide more uniform services

throughout the region.

To help coordinate the study, Vincent established a weekly seminar for the

project team and other faculty who were interested. Local city administrators also

were invited to attend and make presentations so that faculty not participating in

field interviews could get a better perspective on how administrators perceived the

local government system and their role in it. Among those attending was Charles

Tiebout. Tiebout was an urban-regional economist who had already provided a

model of how demands for public goods could be articulated by citizens with

similar preferences grouping together in different municipalities (Tiebout 1956).

Tiebouts analysis was a traditional equilibrium-optimization model that

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required many assumptions in order to achieve the optimum. These included an

infinitely large market size to provide a sufficient number of municipalities and no

mobility costs.

Most political scientists rejected the model, at least in those years, because the

assumptions were unrealistic. However, an Austrian3 approach to markets does not

require the same limiting assumptions. Austrian markets are not focused on

equilibrium and optimization; they focus on information, incentives, innovation,

adjustments, and feedback. In this approach, having a multiplicity of municipalities

with different taxes and services should lead citizens to select the municipality

where the combination of housing available, taxes, and public services most meets

their preferences. This is not an economists utopia, but is better than the

alternative of only one level of service for everyone.

The results of the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area Study are detailed in Robert

Warrens Government in Metropolitan Regions: A Reappraisal of Fractionated

Political Organization (Warren 1966). The theoretical comparison of a consolidated

system (labeled Gargantua) and a fragmented system (labeled polycentric) was

examined in the classic article, The Organization of Government in Metropolitan

Regions: A Theoretical Inquiry, by V. Ostrom, Tiebout, and Warren (1961). An

explicit public choice analysis is provided in my The Public Economy of

Metropolitan Areas (Bish 1971), written for economists, and shortly after in a more

popular American Enterprise Institute publication with Vincent, Understanding

Urban Government: Metropolitan Reform Reconsidered (Bish and V. Ostrom 1973).

Many of the municipalities studied had been created in the 1950s with

boundaries that followed land-use classifications from the county plan. This

resulted in some very specialized municipalities, such as the cities of Industry,

Commerce, and Dairy Valley, as well as many residential suburbs with very

different populations and characteristics where there were significant differences in

the public services that were provided as anticipated by Tiebout. Most striking,

however, was how new municipalities, the first of which was Lakewood, had not

begun with in-house bureaucratic production of municipal services. Instead, they

contracted with other governments (primarily the county) or with private

companies to produce the services decided upon by the municipal council. With

seventy-six municipalities in Los Angeles County, a large market existed so there

could be specialization in production. This model was labeled Lakewood Plan

Cities. Warren used a market analogy to describe the system in A Municipal

Services Market Model of Metropolitan Organization (Warren 1964). Within this

market, municipalities were both buyers and sellers, and municipal producers could

be as efficient as private firms under the right incentives. This is described in Scale

and Monopoly Problems in Urban Government Services (Bish and Warren 1972),

which is based on Warrens findings that the difference in production costs

between municipal in-house production and contracted-out production was not


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due to the difference between public and private. It was due to whether the

producing organization had competition or was a monopoly.

It is impossible to disentangle the contributions of Vincent, Tiebout, Warren,

and others involved in the Los Angeles metropolitan area study, but the outcomes

had a major impact on how we think about local governance in metropolitan areas

and on the theories we use to study local governments. To an economist, the

approach is relatively simple: local governments are collective consumption units.

Thus, on the demand side, we have not only individuals, families, and all kinds of

private or cooperative organizations, but also organizations of citizens who make

their purchase decisions (labeled provision decisions) jointly, usually through an

elected municipal or county council. On the production side, we have not only

individuals and private firms, but also local government producing bureaucracies

that sell in the market. We no longer can conceptualize public or private with

the assumption that public means a council with its own producing bureaucracy.

We must instead look at the detail as to what organizations are making provision

decisions and what organizations are producing services. All of these organizations

function as an industry within a legal system, which Vincent labeled the public

economy. In summary, metropolitan areas have a variety of institutional

arrangements that may be every bit as complex as the California water industry.

In their classic 1961 article, V. Ostrom, Tiebout, and Warren did not argue that

their polycentric model was superior to Gargantua for organizing government in a

metropolitan area. They argued that we must proceed to empirical evidence

because we have competing theories. What they launched was an incredible stream

of empirical research on the associated issues, which included Elinor Ostroms first

major postdoctoral research: the police studies.4

Elinors local government research began at a very fundamental level: to be sure

citizens could perceive the level and quality of service they were receiving. She and

her graduate students and colleagues developed multiple measures of police

performance and compared the costs and performance of different policing

activities (e.g., police patrol, homicide investigation, laboratory analysis) for a

multiplicity of differently sized and differently organized departments. Her

empirical research demonstrated that different policing activities possessed different

economies of scale and that within the police industry bottoms-up arrangements

among providers and producers could create more efficient production than either

large hierarchical police departments or small police departments that did not enter

into cooperative arrangements on activities where economies of scale existed (Parks

1985). The policing research strengthened the relevance of Robert Warrens

observations on how the markets for public services had evolved in Los Angeles

County and contributed significantly to the importance of Vincents earlier

theoretical work.

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Vincent as a Political Economist and Public ChoiceTheorist

Following his own empirical work on water resources, Elinors dissertation, his

participation in the Los Angeles metropolitan area study and his use of concepts

from public choice theory, it is useful to look at some of the key elements of

Vincents way of thinking as he approached two seminal works: The Political Theory

of a Compound Republic (V. Ostrom 1971a) and The Intellectual Crisis in American

Public Administration (V. Ostrom 1973).

Vincent had demonstrated a thorough understanding and ability to use

traditional economic analysis in his earlier work on water resources. He had also

published water resources work in the American Economic Review where all but one

citation was to major natural resources economists; the exception was to a court

case. What bothered him about economics as it was taught in the 1950s and 1960s,

however, was the treatment of government as if it were a single sovereign. What

made that teaching worse was that economists conducted a policy analysis of a

market failure (e.g., a failure to reach an equilibrium-optimum) and then

recommended that the government impose the optimum solution as if this were

a simple task.5 To a political scientist, it was as if economists assumed Platos

philosopher king was alive and well, and also in charge.

Throughout his writings, Vincent did not describe his work in terms of markets

because the model of a market to mainstream economists implies packageable

goods with an equilibrium-optimum expecteda model that is inappropriate for

the public economy and rejected by most political scientists. Once Ostrom,

Tiebout, and Warren added the concept of collective consumption organizations

(e.g., local governments), some economists followed Warren in his market model

article and looked at the public economy as a market, but one that is significantly

different from that of mainstream economists and more in keeping with a view of

markets in the broader sense of Adam Smith and the Austrians. Vincent and Elinor

also differentiated a model from a framework where a model had fixed

assumptions and a framework had a list of variables to be drawn upon as most

appropriate (V. Ostrom 2007). Warrens market model was a framework although

that distinction was not present in Vincents writings in the 1960s. Most important,

however, is that a Warrens market model requires the integration of political

science and economics and rejection of the idea that the public economy can be

effectively understood within the confines of either of those disciplines. Vincent

also emphasized the need for care in using the assumption that individuals only

act rationally in their own narrow self-interest. In many situations, individuals

may give priority to other objectives, such as fairness, especially when

organizing institutional arrangements. This observation was further reinforced by

Elinors empirical and experimental research (E. Ostrom 1990; E. Ostrom et al.

1994).


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The most serious problem with economics, however, was considering any failure

to reach an equilibrium-optimum as a reason for government intervention.

Vincents previous work on water resources and local government did not lead to a

conclusion that a government, conceptualized as a single sovereign running a

gargantuan bureaucracy, would not experience its own failures. James Buchanan

had described the standard economists approach as having the second singer

problem. After the first singer sang, the judges decided that the second could

not be worse and awarded the prize to the second without hearing her sing.

This problemassuming the government efficiently knows what people want and

efficiently produces the outcome whenever the conditions of perfect competition

with packageable goods are not metwas the basis for creating the Public Choice

Society in 1963. The initial members were committed to examining both market

and government failures in order to obtain a better understanding of how the

public sector actually works and what can be expected from it.

Vincent was a founding member and early president of the Public Choice

Society; Elinor was a later president. The founders, with James Buchanan and

Gordon Tullock credited with having the original idea, also included William Riker

from Rochester. Public choice still retains methodology that includes individual

preferences, namely, methodological individualism (i.e., one always must consider

individuals, their preferences and the choices they face), explicit consideration of

the nature of the good or resource (i.e., goods can range from purely private

packageable goods to pure public goods and common-pool resources), and

institutional arrangements (which include both constitutional and operational

choice rules). Public choice differs from most political science with its

methodological individualism and consideration of the nature of the good or

resource, and from most economics with its attention to the details of institutions

(Bish 1971) and rejection of an assumption that transactions always lead toward an

equilibrium. Within this approach the single work that had the most influence on

Vincent was Buchanan and Tullocks Calculus of Consent (Buchanan and Tullock

1962) and specifically its focus on constitutional choice.

Recent work (Boettke and Coyne 2005) has described public choice as being

made up of three schools: Virginia (based on the work of Buchanan and Tullock),

Rochester (Riker), and Bloomington (Vincent and Elinor). The Rochester school

continued formal models and is also referred to as social choice. The Virginia

school is by far the largest and closest to Bloomington, but many of its followers

(but not Buchanan and his students) are traditional equilibrium-optimization

economists, who have simply added government to their analysis. This means that

within public choice, there can be the two very different paradigms that Vincent

confronted in the debate with Bain, Caves, and Margolis on the California water

industry and the difference between Gargantua and polycentricity in local

government.

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The Bloomington school focuses most closely on institutional arrangements

within polycentric systems, especially as Elinor and Vincent developed the

Institutional Analysis and Development approach (E. Ostrom 2005). This stresses

the importance of individuals and the nature of the resource or service in a specific

action situation in terms of individual choice rules, operating rules for the

organizations individuals deal with, and the constitutional rules those organizations

operate under. Vincent and Elinor also emphasized that in any specific action

situation, one must understand the motivation of the individuals. One cannot

assume narrow self-interest, as is common in the Virginia and Rochester

approaches (McGinnis and E. Ostrom 2012). This is another place where Vincent

and Elinor used a framework and not a model as did many Virginia school

economists (V. Ostrom 2007). Elinor also used a broader range of approaches to

research than did the others, including game theory, experimental, case studies,

and small and large comparative studies (E. Ostrom 2010). She also continued

an emphasis on common-pool resources that followed from her dissertation

(E. Ostrom 1965) and her classic Governing the Commons: The Evolution of

Institutions for Collective Action (E. Ostrom 1990). Elinor and Workshop staff also

were instrumental in starting the International Association for the Study of the

Commons, which has become a major international organization.

Federalism and The Intellectual Crisis

Following the 1967 Public Choice seminar taught with Herb Kiesling, Vincent

returned to an analysis of how the theory of a federal system related to his idea of

polycentricity. He stated that he reread The Federalist (Hamilton, Jay, and Madison

n.d.) from the perspective of a political economist, and it gave him a much more

integrated understanding of the logic of Madison and Hamilton as they explained

the draft of the U.S. Constitution. With hindsight, this is not surprising. The

approach in The Federalist appears to be the same as the eighteenth-century

Scottish philosophy of scholars such as David Hume, whom Hamilton cites

(no. 84), and Adam Smith (V. Ostrom 1987, 21). Smiths (1937 [1776]) market

economics and the constitutional analysis of The Federalist both view individuals in

the same way, both have a similar normative perspective, and in both, to use terms

from economics, the issues of competition, monopoly, information, and

coordination among many independent individuals and organizations are central

to the analysis (Bish 1987). Smiths approach to markets is consistent with

Vincents polycentricity and closely allied with the Austrian approach to markets

rather than the equilibrium-optimization approach used by many contemporary

economists. Vincents rereading of The Federalist also reinforced the importance of

the difference between polycentricity and single-sovereign approaches he had

encountered in water resources and metropolitan government.


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Vincents previous work was brought together in his seminal The Political Theory

of a Compound Republic and The Intellectual Crisis in Public Administration in 1971

and 1973. The critical ideas in these two works cannot be separated, and there is

some repetition. The Compound Republic, which is subtitled A Reconstruction of the

Logical Foundations of American Democracy as Presented in The Federalist,

analyzes the difference between Vincents interpretations and those of other

Federalist scholars and, most important, the paradigm of Walter Bagehot and

Woodrow Wilson, who believed every government has (or should have) a single

sovereign. In The Intellectual Crisis, he goes into much more detail on the paradigm

problem and introduces the difference between classical public administration and

the congruence of the contemporary political economists (previously labeled in

his work, public choice theory) and democratic administration. Democratic

administration is described by both Max Weber and Alexis de Tocqueville to

contrast with bureaucratic administration.

Democratic administration assumes that civil servants are no different from

anyone else and they need to be nested in multi-organizational systems, where there

are checks and balances so citizens can hold them to account. In his detailed

description of democratic administration, Vincent also points out many places in

The Federalist where the authors approach to cooperation and rivalry among

individuals and governments was consistent with democratic administration

(V. Ostrom 1971a, 8089). He also made clear in The Compound Republic that the

founders conception of federalism was consistent with contemporary political

economy and Tocquevilles democratic administration (V. Ostrom 1971a, 119). To

this end, he specifically cites that The Federalist authors considered that the logic of

a federal system could be extended into the system of governments within each

state (V. Ostrom 1971a, 84).

Vincent now had an integrated theoretical framework that brought together his

thinking in all of his previous work. It reinforced the rejection of what he

had called the ethical-observer model in water resources, and it eliminated the

distinction between political science and economics when governments are

considered collective consumption units within a market, which Vincent labeled

polycentricity. The rereading of The Federalist showed that all of these approaches

were part of the same paradigm, and in opposition to ethical-observer single-

sovereign approaches. Most important, the paradigm was based on the design of

governments in the United States, and thus appropriate for diagnosing and

proposing solutions to real problems in the United States.

Vincents rereading of The Federalist convinced him that his approach was

thoroughly grounded in the fundamentals of the U.S. Constitution. It was as if the

return to The Federalist provided validation for his previous efforts and the

approach to analysis that he was following. His explicit recognition that the logic in

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The Federalist could be extended to the system of governments within each state

further reinforced his attraction to Tocqueville (1945 [1835, 1840]).

It is important to recognize a fundamental difference between Vincents

federalism and that of many other scholars. Vincents focus is on an integrated

theory of federalism where one must differentiate between constitutional choice and

operational rules for all kinds of governments. Constitutional rules are the rules the

government itself uses to make operational decisions and the government, through

normal decision processes, cannot change those rules. There is no hierarchy of

governments or discussion of levels of government; instead, he states that

principles of federalism permit people to function through self-governing

institutions among local, regional, and national communities of interest in

organizing collective endeavors (V. Ostrom 1987, 173). This logic can also be

extended to supranational organizations such as the European Community.

Citizens are simultaneously citizens in a multiplicity of governments and each one

has its own constitutional rules. For the national government, we think first of the

U.S. Constitution and Supreme Court decisions. For states, we add state

constitutions and court decisions, and for local governments we add, depending on

the state, state legislation, and/or home rule charters. The conceptual difference

between constitutional rules and operational rules appears simple. In practice, it

may require the kind of research Vincent engaged in on water resources and local

governments. Vincents interest was constitutional choice, and that is what Elinors

empirical work concentrated on.

A second difference between Vincent and other scholars, including James

Buchanan and most economists, is that economists generally consider federalism to

consist of levels of government, each with clearly defined and nonoverlapping

jurisdiction over particular functions (Buchanan 1995; Oates 1972).6 Within this

model, the focus is usually on exit (voting with ones feet) for dissatisfied citizens,

and in Buchanans case, the right for states to exit the federation as well. While

Vincent would not object to exit strategies, he places much more emphasis on

competition, both intergovernmental and interjurisdictional, among government so

that when citizens are unsatisfied with services from one government they may be

sought from another. For example, if one is unsatisfied with local schools, one may

seek supplementary programs from the state or national governments. Similarly, if

local police are corrupt, citizens have recourse to state and federal police.

Overlapping to avoid the monopoly problem was as important to Vincents theory

of federalism as was choice among competitors to Adam Smith in markets (Bish

1987). Vincents polycentricity is a dynamic, multiorganizational systemnot two

levels of government, each with a monopoly over some government functions.

Following publication of The Compound Republic Vincent continued to expand

on his approach to federalism. Both subsequent editions of The Compound Republic

(V. Ostrom 1987; V. Ostrom and Allen 2008) were enlarged and among his


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publications were eleven articles in Publius: The Journal of Federalism from 1974 to

1995. Among his additions was his own examination of Adam Smith and the

parallels of the idea of a covenant with that of a constitution (V. Ostrom 1980).

To help understand the work Vincent moved to next, it is useful to look more

closely at problems he perceived for the United States.

Vincents Diagnosis ofWeakness in the American System

Vincent began Understanding Urban Government (Bish and V. Ostrom 1973)

believing that how one thinks determines ones diagnosis of a problem and the

solutions one proposes. His analyses had convinced him that most political

scientists and others interested in public policy thought in terms of the single-

sovereign model of government. This also led him to consider the actual language

we use as being critical. It made a great deal of difference, for example, as to

whether government or governments was used to refer to the public sector.

Language and thought go together. If people always use the term government,

they will not think in terms of a public economy comprised of governments.

Vincents diagnosis of a second weakness was closely related. It is the faith

people have in single-sovereign solutions and bureaucracy. Vincent seems to have

paid the most attention to the analysis of bureaucracy in writings by Tullock,

Weber, and Tocqueville. Tullocks The Politics of Bureaucracy (1965) examines the

incentives that exist within bureaucracies, which explain that unless constrained by

competition, which threatens their survival, bureaucracies are unlikely to produce

efficient satisfaction for the clients they are supposed to serve. It is a

straightforward public choice analysis that gets at the incentives faced by

individuals within a bureaucracy instead of treating bureaucracies as an organic

unit.

Webers analysis is different. He first describes bureaucracy as one of his ideal

types. The ideal type is described as perfectly functioning with efficient knowledge

transmission and appropriate decision making. However, Webers ideal types are

not real-world descriptions; they are models analysts can use to compare what

happens in the real world with the model and with other models. Weber also had

an ideal type for democratic administration. Weber observed that in operation, a

bureaucracy becomes rigid, mechanical, and unable to adapt to changing

conditions. It is not an ideal way to organize government. In contrast, his model

of democratic administration is more responsive to citizens and more adaptable.

However, in spite of the desirable characteristics of democratic administration,

Weber believed it was not feasible on a large scale, but rather had to be limited to

smaller governments. He was pessimistic about large-scale bureaucracies, but did

not believe there was an alternative. Weber does not seem to have contemplated

Vincents polycentricity, or federalism, as the way to govern a large society.

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Tocqueville was also pessimistic about the extension of democratic administra-

tion to a large scale, but for a different reason than Weber. Tocqueville did not

believe citizens understand how democratic administration and multicentered

systems work; hence, citizens seek solutions to problems with a single-sovereign

bureaucratic approach. Tocqueville believed that the faith in single-sovereign

solutions would eventually suffocate the energy of citizens and destroy democratic

administration. Vincent took Webers and Tocquevilles conclusions seriously.

Vincent approached these problems with a belief that Webers problem could be

overcome with the right institutional design in a polycentric system. This involved

developing a much better understanding of how institutions worked in the context

of what Tocqueville had called a science of association. Furthermore, a science of

association had to be understood by citizens so they would not always seek

recourse to single-sovereign solutionswhich were not actually likely to work

because of the basic design of the American system and the inability of large

bureaucracies to function efficiently. Vincent did not share all of Tocquevilles

conclusions but Vincent was concerned with what he perceived to be a decline in

public participation in civic life, something that went beyond simply participation

in governance, and the increasing nationalization of activities that had formerly

been left to civic associations or state and local governments where citizen

participation was much more likely.

There are many elements to a science of association. However, it is useful to

keep in mind that Vincents position always viewed institutional arrangements and

innovations in institutional arrangements as human artifacts, and not spontaneous

creations.7 Second, Vincent assumed that people acted in their own self-interest

rightly understood, which means that people can agree on operational and

constitutional rules for mutual long-run benefit and can have motivations beyond

narrow self-interest. However, there was also a potential for factions inimical to

the public interest as described in The Federalist. The analysis of factions has

exploded under the rubric of rent-seeking, whereby special interests use

government regulations and laws to create special privileges for themselves

(Buchanan et al. 1980). Adam Smith had observed this in his critique of the British

Crown granting exclusive licenses to particular businesses, which created

monopolies and disadvantaged consumers. The Federalist thought that the

democratic principle of majority voting would control factions, but in the

United States at least, they were clearly wrong.8 This means a science of association

must have within it an understanding of how to facilitate cooperation among the

multitude of organizations in a public economy while also preventing the collusion

of factions to the disadvantage of citizens. This is a huge task.

Given the magnitude of the problems Vincent perceived in America, he began to

explore the foundations of governance regimes in other countries. He started with a

reanalysis of American federalism (V. Ostrom 1991), with several articles published


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in Publius: The Journal of Federalism. He explicitly expanded his focus on

Tocqueville and the need to consider all civic activities, which he called res publica,

as a basis for a self-governing society. He continued to build on Hobbes, Hamilton,

Madison, and Tocqueville, but also considered self-government in other countries.

He did little writing on the issues in other countries, but through the Workshop at

Indiana, he attracted comparativists and mentored a large number of major books

by such authors as Mark Sproule-Jones (Canada), Filippo Sabetti (Italy), Robert

Netting (Switzerland), Brian Loveman (Spanish America), James Wunsch (Central

Africa), Dele Olowu (Nigeria), Sheldon Gellar (Senegal), Amos Sawyer (Liberia),

Alexander Obolonsky (Russia), Antoni Kaminski (communist regimes), and his

PhD student Tai-Shuenn Yang (China). Vincent moved distinctly from smaller-

scale concerns into macro analyses of the nature of regimes and their institutional

characteristics. Unfortunately, illnesses affecting his eyesight and nervous system

precluded another comprehensive book on polycentrism. His last book-length work

was pessimistic: The Meaning of Democracy and the Vulnerability of Democracies: A

Response to Tocquevilles Challenge (V. Ostrom 1997). He remained perplexed by

what he perceived as declining citizen self-governance and the nationalization of

issues that he felt could be better dealt with at subnational levels of government.

MovingToward a Science of Association

There is no mechanical way to move toward a science of association. There are too

many potential variables to take into account, and an analyst must select those that

are most relevant for any particular analysis. This is what makes institutional

analysis an art as well as a science. As an art, it is like having a box of tools. A good

mechanic must know how the machine is designed and operates and then know

what tools to use in any particular situation. Institutional analysis involves both

aspects.

First, one must understand the principles underlying the public economy, which

in the United States are contained in The Federalist, Tocqueville, and other works

described by Vincent. Next, one must identify the preferences of the affected

citizens for a public service or the use of a natural resource. Then one must look at

the institutional arrangements, which include how affected individuals make their

preferences known (collective-choice rules), how provision decisions are made

(organizational choice), and the rules under which provision-decision organizations

operate (constitutional rules) (E. Ostrom 2005). As one proceeds with this analysis,

additional critical concepts include fiscal equivalence, transaction costs, principal-

agent problems, rent-seeking, and veto points. Finally, normative criteria include

whether affected individuals think the arrangements and outcomes are fair and

whether there are gross inefficiencies that could contribute to mutual benefits that

are not being achieved. This sounds much simpler than it is in practice because it

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must take place within a civil society where citizens play an important role in both

governmental and nongovernmental institutions.

The most important scholar in the development of a science of association to

counter the single-sovereign model has been Elinor Ostrom. Elinor led empirical

work worldwide, beginning with her dissertation, studies of citizen perceptions of

their local services, and the largest-scale study of a public service industry, policing,

that has been done in the United States. After that, most of her work was on

natural resources and commons problems. While Vincent and Elinor developed

theory together, they did have a division of labor. Lin developed empirical research

skills and had the management skills to implement projects in cooperation with

both graduate students and colleagues from other universities, often in other

countries. Vincent continued to examine the relationship between political

economy and other scholarship, including Adam Smith on fiscal equivalence,

additional history and thinking about American local government, the parallels

between covenants and a constitution (V. Ostrom 1980), and the liberal

continuation of European Austrian work by Eucken (1951). Vincent did more

detailed analyses of the importance of language in thought as he continued to

confront Tocquevilles challenge (V. Ostrom 1997). The success of their work and

their codirection of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis is an

incredible achievement, but there is much more to be done.

Final Observations

As I complete this review, I have two observations. First, I am disappointed that

Vincent and Elinors work, in spite of her Nobel Prize in Economics, is not better

understood by economists. Much empirical work in economics is not based on the

purely competitive model or devoted only to private goods markets, although that

is what is commonly taught in most economics departments. Econometrics was

developed in agricultural economics, and the largest economics research

organization in the United States (and probably the world), the National Bureau

of Economic Research, emerged from the old institutional economics framework

associated with Commons and Ayres. In practice, there is little difference between

the empirical work based on the IAD framework and much of the empirical work

in economics.

A second observation is that Vincent gave only limited attention to the role of

factions and rent-seeking in the American system. One of the problems within

polycentricity, as well as within single-sovereign systems, is that factions may get

organized and use legal means to exploit citizens and consumers. This is exhibited

by a multitude of special interest grants, program expenditures and tax concessions,

especially from the national government. Factions can discourage the average

citizen from playing the role that is needed in a science of association to help


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overcome Tocquevilles challenge, whereby citizens do not understand how special

interests exploit the system and seek recourse in a single sovereign.

It is with regard to minority factions and rent seeking where Hamilton,

Madison, and Vincent are weakest in their analyses. Hamilton and Madison

expected requirements for majority voting in Congress to control minority factions

and did not devote the same effort to their analysis as they did to constraining

majority factions with checks and balances within the federal system. Vincents

analysis also focused on the overlapping that allowed citizens to seek recourse to

another unit of government if results from one did not meet their preferences. This

emphasis is maintained in Chapter 9 of the revised and expanded Compound

Republic (2008), where it is also proposed to apply the concept of a public sector

industry to national programs that would use state and local governments to

deliver national programs.

This approach is consistent with the Ostroms earlier work, but it assumes that

congressional decision making results in truly national programs. This may not be

a good assumption given how Congress makes decisions. Congress is divided into

many committees and subcommittees that are small enough for individuals to be

potential holdouts before allowing legislation to reach the floor unless their special

provision on behalf of a minority faction is included (Teles 2013). This

environment is an incredibly rich one for rent seeking where the government

revenues end up being treated as if they are a commons for all to draw upon with

no single special interest, in either taxation or expenditures, being large enough to

draw attention when the legislation finally reaches the floor for a majority vote. The

net result, however, is a labyrinth of special interest provisions and organizations

that may not function like Warrens market model or Vincents California water

industry because of the lack of fiscal equivalence.

Warrens and Vincents polycentric systems were comprised primarily of

organizations characterized by fiscal equivalence. (Olson 1969). Fiscal equivalence

exists when the organizations decisions reflect the preferences of the beneficiaries

and those beneficiaries pay the costs. It can be extremely difficult to create this

incentive system when the national government pays the costs but smaller units

make the decisionsnot impossible, but very difficult. Neither Vincent nor Elinor

were experts in legislative decision making and neither devoted their energy to

evaluating the results of tax concessions or the performance of nationally funded

but locally administered programs. I agree that the industry approach is the place

to start, but the analyses will be undertaken in a different environment than that of

previous work on local governments and the California water industry. We all

would benefit from the work of scholars who take a political economy approach to

this issue.

Finally, in spite of some weaknesses on rent seeking, Vincent and Elinor Ostrom

helped restore the importance of federalism, and most important, an expanded

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theory of federalism, in the American system. Their industry approach extended the

analysis of Hamilton and Madison beyond just the study of governments into the

public economy and civil society where we now have a framework for looking at

both the governance and the production of public goods and services in a

polycentric systemnot just a purely competitive market and not just an integrated

bureaucracy, but rather in an industry, something in between. Vincent also moved

federalism away from the study of levels of government in favor of looking at

operational and constitutional-choice rules for different governments, including

local governments. It was further along in his career that Vincent added the

importance of nesting government institutions in the broader civil society, which

he believed was a necessary condition for the trust required for citizens to

understand their interdependencies and self-interest rightly understoodnot the

narrow self-interest that makes many kinds of mutually beneficial cooperation

unachievable.

Notes

I wish to thank Barbara Allen, Herman Boschken, Michael Fotos, John Kincaid,

Patty Lezotte, Nancy Malecek, Mark-Sproule Jones, Robert Warren, James Walker,

and referees for Publius for assistance in preparing this article.

1 Many of the Ostroms publications are available on the site thanks to the archival work

of Workshop staff and Professor Barbara Allen, who also assisted Vincent with the last

editions of The Compound Republic and The Intellectual Crisis.

2 POBSCORB is the acronym for the tasks of a public administrator: Planning,

Organizing, Staffing, Directing, COordinating, Reporting, and Budgeting. The focus is

on an organization, not interorganizational relationships.

3 Vincents work is very similar to that of the Austrian economists, especially Mises (1949)

and Hayek (1945, 1960). Boettke and Coyne (2005), and Aligica and Boettke (2009)

describe Vincent and the Bloomington School of Public Choice as reaching the same

conclusions as Knight, Mises, and Hayek. However, Vincent cites Knight on the

statistical properties of certainty, risk, and uncertainty in earlier work and only refers to

Hayeks The Constitution of Liberty (1960) much later. Vincent built on Hobbes,

Hamilton, Madison, Tocqueville, Ashby, and Weber to come to conclusions that were

virtually the same as those of Mises and Hayek. The major difference is that many

Austrians, especially Mises, did not believe that empirical work was necessary to validate

their theories. Vincent, Elinor, and the Bloomington School of Public Choice always

considered empirical work as critical to distinguishing the usefulness of one theory and

paradigm from another.

4 A summary of police and other studies is presented in V. Ostrom, Bish, and E. Ostrom

(1988, ch. 7). Many economists researched the differences between in-house bureaucratic

production and contracted-out private production. That research makes an important

contribution to the study of the public economy, but when one looks more closely, it is


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the competitive bidding process that generates private production efficiency, and private

firms under sole-source contracts are often much more expensive than in-house

production (McDavid 1985).

5 The major critic of the mainstream approach was James M. Buchanan (1960, 1967), but

at the time, most economists ignored his writings. Buchanan insisted on methodological

individualism to analyze public finance and tax policy and continued this approach with

Gordon Tullock as one of the founders of public choice. Buchanan received the Nobel

Prize in Economics in 1986.

6 An important exception to the generalization about economists is Gordon Tullock,

coauthor of The Calculus of Consent (Buchanan and Tullock 1962) with James

Buchanan. Tullock has followed Vincents approach and even includes home-owners

associations in The New Federalist (Tullock 1994).

7 McGinnis (2005) has emphasized that Vincent rejected the concept of spontaneity that

was important in Austrian thought. I agree that Vincent rejected the concept as

described by McGinnis, but do not believe that it is an accurate characterization of the

Austrians. The Austrians believed that everyone planned, and individuals in

organizations planned on behalf of their organization; however, unanticipated

innovations could emerge from such planning and be viewed as spontaneous from

the perspective of the larger system. McGinnis also seems to view spontaneous as leading

toward an equilibrium, but that is not a general characteristic of Austrian economics, as

with Adam Smith, it is innovation that drives the economy and again there is no

assumption of an equilibrium.

8 Smith was most likely aware that in 1641 during the Glorious Revolution in England,

more than 700 monopolies granted by the Crown were eliminated, freeing up

competition for basic goods desired by consumers. Vincent did not devote research to

factions, but research by others (Olson 1982; Acemoglu and Robinson 2012) indicates

that special interests that The Federalist would label factions can cause a significant

reduction in economic growth in an economy. Vincent includes many examples of what

economists would label rent-seeking under the title of Newspeak and Doublethink

where conscious mislabeling is used to describe government programs (V. Ostrom 1997,

ch. 3). Vincent was also frustrated by the increasing nationalization of what had been

state and local government issues, especially through the use of the spending power

whereby the national government assumed regulatory authority as a condition of

providing financing in areas beyond its constitutional jurisdiction. An important analysis

of this problem is Robert Higgss Crisis and Leviathan (Higgs 1987), where each time

there is a crisis the national government (or state in the case of local issues) intervenes

but never leaves. Higgs labels this the ratchet effect. Vincent did not treat this in 1971,

but did in the 1987 Compound Republic.

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