Lost in the media flurry over Obama’s Nobel Prize is another Nobel award that is more unprecedented and (to federalism fans) more exciting: Elinor Ostrom’s winning the Nobel for Economics. The award is unprecedented, not just because Professor Ostrom is the first woman to win the prize but also because she is not an economist but a political scientist. (She is not even an especially mathematical political scientist in, say, the Positive Political Theory mold: She is actually more of an institutional political scientist whose methods — the detailed case study of a specific government or community — harken back to those old German-influenced institutional economists of the late 19th century like Richard Ely and John Commons).
But why should we lovers of federalism feel excited by this award? Because Ostrom and her students have been a rare source of intellectual and empirical support in a cold, cold world. Supporting federalism in a law school is generally a lonely business, as I can attest: The average law prawf is instinctively a centralizer, both because prawfs as a general matter have an intellectuals’ pernicious distrust of lay judgment and, more specifically, because law prawfs’ knowledge of decentralization generally is limited to a handful of dysfunctional cases like Jim Crow in the South. The law prawfs’ Bible on decentralization — indeed, often the only political science that they have ever read on the topic — is Madison’s Federalist #10. Sure, there are plenty of pseudo-federalism fans among law prawfs. But many of these are simply libertarians in federalism camouflage — folks like Ilya Somin, Richard Epstein, and other heirs of the Buchanan-Weingast theory that federalism constrains Leviathan through residential powers of exit. They like subnational government more than national government the way a boxer prefers a featherweight to Mike Tyson — because the former is easier to knock down.
So the Nobel for Professor Ostrom, a leading proponent of political decentralization including federalism, comes as a welcome relief to us lovers of federalism. Ostrom and her students (Roger Parks, Ronald Oakerson, David Bromley, among others) have produced a myriad of studies of common-pool resources ranging from policing in metropolitan areas to ground water in California to show that such resources can best be managed through forms of limited-access government intermediate between pure privatization and Leviathan. The Ostromites provided a counter-narrative suggesting that subnational institutions help protect private individuals not only from Leviathan but also from free riding, apathy, and other common-pool tragedies. The Ostromites also contradicted the old Federalist #10 bromide that minorities always do worse in smaller jurisdictions by providing solid empirical evidence that minorities actually benefit enormously from decentralized political power. (One of Ostrom’s classic studies, co-authored with Gordon Whittaker, shows that Black residents in the St. Louis Metro area trust cops in small villages more than in large cities, even when the latter is governed by Black politicians).
So true friends of federalism should raise their glass and toast the wisdom of those Norwegians. Maybe Obama did not need the Nobel boost, but we few, we happy few, we band of federalism brothers and sisters, sure did.
Posted by Rick Hills on October 14, 2009 at 12:51 PM
Comments
My apologies for completely your request for my favorite Ostrom pieces. I think that Her co-authored book, Rules, Games, and Common-Pool Resources (U Michigan Press 1994) is the best place to start. There is also a good collection of material written by her and her students entitled “Polycentricity and Local Public Economies” edited by Michael McGinnis.
Posted by: Rick Hills | Oct 21, 2009 1:09:02 PM
This is good news and Professor Ostrom deserves congratulations for the recognition of her achievements. The Nobel committee has given awards to a number of Americans this year for work in the physical and social sciences–medicine, physics, economics, chemistry. This is a heartening reminder that we are very blessed to live in a place with such talented people.
Posted by: charliemartel | Oct 14, 2009 9:38:08 PM
The Nobel in Economics is given by the Swedes, not the Norwegians.
Posted by: SC | Oct 14, 2009 4:29:50 PM
Rick,
I share your celebration. Would you be willing to post a short reading list–a kind of greatest hits of Ostrom’s writing on federalism?
Posted by: Kurt Lash | Oct 14, 2009 2:09:11 PM