Original Theories and Current Studies

Constitutional Artisanship and Institutional Diversity:Elinor Ostrom, Vincent Ostrom, and the Workshop Filippo Sabetti (bio) A story is told around the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University that when Elinor Ostrom received a call from Nobel representatives in the very early morning of October 10, 2009, her words to Vincent, her spouse and colleague, went something like this: "Wake up, honey. We have won a prize." 1 The emphasis on "we" is not surprising as Elinor Ostrom—Lin for many of us—has always acknowledged that "none of us [at the Workshop] could have achieved what we have done without [Vincent's] inspiration, criticism, encouragement, and help." 2 Thus, Lin's selection as a recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences also helped to spotlight the pioneering quest of Vincent to understand public affairs. As the good news spread, the Workshop was inundated with congratulatory messages from Workshoppers around the world, sharing in the "we have won a prize" celebration. I and other first-generation Workshoppers joined the present sixth-generation in a chorus of congratulations. 3 For me, it all started, in the spring of 1968, when I had the good fortune of receiving a telephone call from Lin, then the graduate advisor in the Department of Government (as it was called at that time), urging me to choose Indiana University for graduate studies in political science. She challenged me to learn more about a new and exciting interdisciplinary field of public choice that also drew on the Italian school of public finance and fiscal theory. For the first time I heard someone stressing the importance of the works of James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, whose papers I had distractedly noticed in earlier issues of Il Politico, a University of [End Page 73] Pavia journal edited by Bruno Leoni. He had welcomed their contributions when most Anglo-American non-economic journals were not so readily disposed to their innovative thinking. After accepting a position in the 1968 class of graduate students, who formed the first generation of Workshoppers, I found that indeed Buchanan and Tullock were among the pillars of the Workshop curriculum. In the fall of 1968, I took my first graduate course with Vincent Ostrom. The course was based on readings derived largely from classical texts on America and the first generation of public choice scholars. It was not an easy course for me not just because that was my first introduction to readings like The Federalist, Democracy in America, Leviathan, The Calculus of Consent and The Logic of Collective Action but also because I was confronted with a novel approach to these texts. It was the approach to pursue the logic of the propositions as testable hypotheses (at least by experience, if not by rigorous field research) that set Vincent's teaching apart. No one read these books as he did. I was attracted by his challenge and philosophical vision and thus became one of Vincent's Ph.D. students. I served as his Teaching Assistant in two of his undergraduate courses—a most enriching experience for me as well as for the undergraduates. By now, I have read all of Vincent's scholarship since 1968 and much of his earlier work. In the earlier years of the Ostroms' tenure at Indiana University, Vincent had the heavier teaching schedule. By the early 1970s, Lin's courses applying the Workshop's theoretical conceptions in rigorous fieldwork of police studies as well as in other modes of quantitative analysis and modeling, including game theory, had became part of the core curriculum, complementing Vincent's "macro theoretic" approach with empirical studies and "micro theory." Although I somehow missed taking a course from Lin, I experienced what anyone who has read Lin's work, beginning soon after she completed her Ph.D. in 1965 through her most recent award winning works, cannot help but see: the amazing creativity and innovative thinking that were a mainstay at the Workshop. She combined these qualities with a human touch that was genuine, generous and disarming. Her positivity and humility about life were sources of encouragement and strength for all of us and for me in particular...

In this conference we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of "Social Choice and Individual Values" by Kenneth Arrow [14]. Fyodor Dostoevski once said that the literature of the second half of the 19th century grew out of Nikolai Gogol's short novel, "An Overcoat." To paraphrase Dostoevski, we can say that the theory of social choice after 1951 grew out of "Social Choice and Individual Values." Although social decisions are universal, very little work was completed in Russia and the Soviet Union on the theoiy of social choice up until recent times. Thus I am first going to discuss briefly the histoiy of social choice in Russia. I restrict myself to the period up to 1 991 , since I believe this was the year in which a new era in Russian history began. The development of social choice after 1991 is a subject for future investigation.

This book investigates a wide range of ideas, theories, and existing empirical research relevant to the study of the complex and diverse phenomenon of human cooperation. Issues relating to cooperation are examined from the perspective of evolutionary theory, political science, and related social sciences. The book draws upon two bodies of work: Mancur Olson's The Logic of Collective Action (1965) and George C. Williams's Adaptation and Natural Selection (1966). Olson, an economist, and Williams, an evolutionary biologist, both argued that a focus on groups would not provide a complete understanding of collective action and other social behaviors. This introductory chapter discusses some important definitions relating to cooperation, with particular emphasis on collective action and collective action dilemmas, along with coordination and coordination problems. It also provides an overview of the chapters that follow.

This chapter comments on Elinor Ostrom’s 1990 book Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, which issues a direct challenge to conventional economic models of collective action. Focusing on common pool natural resources, Ostrom argues that collective action is a much more common occurrence than predicted by conventional models and proposes eight design principles associated with enduring institutions for resource management. This chapter summarizes Ostrom’s main arguments, including her critique of conventional models on the management of shared natural resources. It also looks at three influential models identified by Ostrom that represent the conventional wisdom: the tragedy of the commons, the prisoners’ dilemma, and the logic of collective action.

The problem ofjustifying democracy arises when a society sees the need for cooperative, collective action. Collective action may be needed to solve coordination problems, public goods problems, Prisoner's Dilemmas, and other structural problems of human interaction or perhaps to realize common ideals of justice in concrete political institutions. Once the need for collective action is established, one must ask how the goals of a cooperative endeavor are to be secured. Cooperation requires that individuals, at least over a specified range of activity, pursue a joint strategy. To assure voluntary compliance in a joint venture, cooperation must be to each person's advantage. However, each person may have an incentive to induce others to cooperate and to defect from the joint strategy in the hope of enjoying the fruits of cooperation without incurring the opportunity costs of compliance. This is the essence of the Prisoner's Dilemma, and considerations of this sort suggest that if collective action is to succeed, policies or strategies formed collectively must be coercively enforceable. Coercion, however, requires justification. Because solving the problem of rational noncompliance requires that collective decisions be coercively enforceable, the rules by which collective decisions are reached require justification. Douglas Rae neatly puts the problem of justification that emerges when political solutions are coercively enforceable as follows: "Once a political community has decided which of its members are to participate directly in the making of collective policy, an important question remains: 'How many of them must agree before a policy is imposed on the community?"" This is essentially the question to which the principle of democratic rule provides an answer: by what process are collective decisions to be made? Answering Rae's question requires a normative framework. We could say that a procedure for making collective decisions is justified if and

When people mobilize for collective action, it is because they want something. These wants are known as grievances, and in order for them to emerge, collectivities must break free of hegemonic power to see their true interests. This paper takes a new look at Smelser’s The Logic of Collective Action and finds that by incorporating a robust understanding of power, Smelser’s framework can provide an understanding of grievance emergence. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: jour

Mancur Olson The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Group

Mancur Olson wrote four books during his career. He wrote The Economics of Wartime Shortage, which studied food shortages in wartime Britain; the Rise and Decline of Nations, which dealt with “institutional sclerosis” caused by interest groups; and Power and Prosperity, which described the formation of government from roving bandits to democracy. But his most seminal work was The Logic of Collective Action (hereafter Logic). In it, Olson laid the foundation for free-riding behavior, created a taxonomy of groups, and extended the problems associated with collective action to a broad class of economic and non-economic phenomena. Olson wrote with simplicity and clarity. This work was so persuasive that several authors attributed the discovery of the free-rider problem to him (Alt 1999; Brand 1983; Baldwin 1989). Others were more critical of his work. They argued against his claimed relationship between group size and the successful provision of collective goods (Frohlich and Oppenheimer 1970; Chamberlin 1974; Esteban and Ray 2001); against the exploitation of large actors by small ones (Sandler 1992); and against the importance of selective incentives in the formation of groups (Marsh 1976; Moe 1980). Some scholars even went so far as to claim that Logic was merely a popularization of earlier ideas (Dowding 1997; Chamberlain 1966).

As Mancur Olson pointed out in his 1965 book, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups , one of the great puzzles of social dynamics is how people overcome collective action problems and organize to pursue common goals. What conditions facilitate and which hinder the emergence of social movements, what allows social movements to persist over time, and what accounts for their impact on social and political dynamics are some of the key questions that scholars have explored over the last few decades.

The article seeks to contribute to the conceptual and comparative debate with its focus on political parties by approaching the topic through the logic of collective action. Starting from an ideologically centered definition of right-wing radicalism, it conceptualizes the radical right in liberal democracies as a collective actor with different ideological as well as organizational manifestations, the latter most notably in party or movement forms. The article argues that unlike other movement-party linkages, which build on clear typological distinctions between parties and movement, radical right parties almost by definition exhibit movement characteristics in that they continuously engage in ‘contentious politics’. Empirical evidence will be drawn from member states of the EU to illustrate the argument. It will be further argued that in the interaction between radical right parties and movements in Western democracies, movements endure where radical right parties remain marginal. In other words, to the extent that radical right parties maintain their movement qualities and become electorally successful, movement mobilization on the far right is inhibited. This ‘Western’ pattern is contrasted by patterns in Eastern Europe, where more porous borders between radical right parties and movements exist along with symbiotic interactions.

That a Chicago School of Economics exists has long been recognized by economists of all persuasions. That a distinct school of "political economy" has also prevailed should occasion little if any surprise, at least amongst economists. We have some confirmation of this contention as far back as the mid-seventies, when Warren J. Samuels edited a volume entitled The Chicago School of Political Economy (1976) and, more recently, with the publication of Chicago Studies in Political Economy (1989a), a collection of papers previously published by leading members of the Chicago persuasion and, edited, appropriately, by George J. Stigler. A recent autobiographical volume by Stigler (1988b) lends further credence to the notion that the Chicago perspective on economics includes a self-conscious orientation toward politics and its study. There is something there; the question is what? First a caveat or two: I do not propose to provide a detailed review of the Stigler collection, nor will I examine, in any detail, the consistency of views among Chicagoans over the years. Instead, I propose to distill the "essence" of Chicagoan political economy during the past thirty years and relate it, as best I can, with Public Choice and Social Choice approaches to politics. The emphasis is upon the "big" issues of substance and methodological concerns. Differentiating a coherent Chicago political economy is a good deal more difficult than discerning and describing the more basic paradigm of Chicago Economics. Lacking basic texts such as The Calculus of Consent and the Arrow and Black's monographs and their central roles in defining public choice and social choice theory, respectively, Chicagoans offer a more diffused view. We are confronted with a vast literature of case studies of regulation and empirical tests of the failures of policies intermingled with occasional theoretical forays into selected aspects of politics such as the nature of political competition in democracies by Stigler (1972), Demsetz (1982) and Becker (1958, 1983), or the more empirical exercises of Stigler (1973) and important articles by Peltzman (1984) on the growth of government and congressional elections and consumer protection (1973, 1975). If some Virginians have been reluctant to test their theories, most Chicagoans have been hyper-cautious about constructing

Since Mancur Olson’s seminal work, The Logic of Collective Action (1965), political scientists, economists, and historians have recognized the problems of cooperation and group action. Research on the Articles of Confederation has been no exception. Scholars have described America’s first federal republic as an exemplar of the collective action problem in need of reform (Cain and Dougherty 1999, Dougherty and Cain 1997, Jillson and Wilson 1994, McLaughlin 1935). The Articles of Confederation organized thirteen states around a system of unenforced taxation that contained no incentives for states to contribute men, money, or supplies to the national government. As a result, states should have withheld their resources. But if we take these claims seriously, we are left with a puzzle. States contributed 53% of the men levied for the Continental army from 1777 to 1783 and 30% of the money requisitioned for the federal treasury from 1784 to 1789. They won the War of Independence and were able to sink one-fifth of the domestic debt within six years of the war.2 If states had no reason to contribute, why did they contribute so much?

Genomic imprinting has been proposed to evolve when a gene's expression has fitness consequences for individuals with different coefficients of matrilineal and patrilineal relatedness, especially in the context of competition between offspring for maternal resources. Previous models have focused on pre-emptive hierarchies, where conflict arises with respect to resource allocation between present and future offspring. Here we present a model in which imprinting arises from scramble competition within litters. The model predicts paternal-specific expression of a gene that increases an offspring's fractional share of resources but reduces the size of the resource pool, and maternal-specific expression of a gene with opposite effects. These predictions parallel the observation in economic models that individuals tend to underprovide public goods, and that the magnitude of this shortfall increases with the number of individuals in the group. Maternally derived alleles are more willing than their paternally derived counterparts to contribute to public goods because they have a smaller effective group size.

US non-tariff barriers as privately provided public goods

In The Logic of Collective Action, Mancur Olson shows how the activities of various political organizations can be fruitfully analyzed using the theory of collective goods. Several of Olson's major conclusions concern the relationship between the size of a group and its ability to provide its members with collective benefits. He concludes that as group size increases, the amount of collective benefits provided will become increasingly suboptimal, and that the absolute amount of collective benefits provided will decrease. This paper shows that Olson's conclusion concerning the relationship between group size and the absolute amount of collective benefits provided is not generally true. Within the framework of analysis used by Olson, it is demonstrated that the relationship is determined by the interaction between two effects, an “income” effect which may cause the level of benefits provided to increase as group size increases, and a “congestion” effect which may cause the level of benefits to decrease as group size increases. The final result is that for “inclusive” collective goods the relationship is an increasing one, while for “exclusive” goods it is a decreasing one. Some implications of this result for the use of the theory of collective goods in studying political processes are discussed.