Scholarly Works on Federalism by Elinor Ostrom and Vincent Ostrom 5
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Editor’s Note Introduction to the Publius Virtual Issue: Scholarly Works on Federalism by Elinor Ostrom and Vincent Ostrom 5 This virtual issue of Publius: The Journal of Federalism highlights many works of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom that were published in Publius over twenty-three years (1973–95). Vincent served on the journal’s editorial advisory board for forty-one years (1972–2012); Elinor served on the board for twenty-seven years (1985–2012). 10 Both were strong supporters of the journal and of democratic federalism as a principle of governance. Elinor died on June 12, 2012 at age seventy-eight; Vincent passed away seventeen days later at age ninety-two. At the times of their deaths, Elinor was Distinguished Professor at Indiana University, Bloomington, and Vincent was the Arthur F. Bentley 15 Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Indiana University. Together in 1973, they founded and then directed what is now the Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University. Elinor Ostrom’s Work in Publius Elinor was a woman of immense scholarly accomplishment, including being the first 20 woman to win the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 2009, a tremendous achievement given that she was a political scientist. She was selected as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world for 2012. She also served as president of the American Political Science Association (1996–97). 25 E. Ostrom’s early political science work dovetailed with that of V. Ostrom by focusing on groundwater resources and the role of public choice in the provision and production of public goods and services in metropolitan areas. Her work, and that of her colleagues, on polycentric policing in metropolitan regions became well known for their empirical challenges to the then standard wisdom that police 30 services and other public services, as well as local governments, in metropolitan Publius:TheJournal of Federalism,pp.1^12 doi:10.1093/publius/pju020 ß TheAuthor 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of CSF Associates: Publius, Inc. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected] 2 Editor’s Note areas should be consolidated into larger entities. Two articles by Elinor are included in this virtual issue: Ostrom, Elinor. 1976. Size and performance in a federal system. Publius 6 (2): 33–73. 5 Ostrom, Elinor, Roger B. Parks, and Gordon P. Whitaker. 1974. Defining and measuring structural variations in interorganizational arrangements. Publius 4 (4): 87–108. Especially prominent was E. Ostrom’s work on policing in the greater St. Louis 10 metropolitan area, a sizable portion of which was published in the 1976 article, ‘‘Size and Performance in a Federal System.’’ The key finding from this empirical work is that very small to medium-sized police departments provide regular patrols, quick responses to reported crimes, emergency services, and other neighborhood police services more effectively than large police departments, and 15 frequently at less cost. ‘‘The theory of federalism which presumes overlapping jurisdiction and fragmentation of authority,’’ concluded E. Ostrom, ‘‘may be a more useful tool for policy analysis in the American political system than the theory that presumes unitary centers of authority.’’ In the next article, ‘‘Defining and Measuring Structural Variations in 20 Interorganizational Arrangements’’ (1974), E. Ostrom, Roger B. Parks, and Gordon P. Whitaker sought to establish a conceptual framework for empirically evaluating the claims made by the metropolitan fragmentation literature. This innovative work carefully defines the key terms employed in the literature, namely, fragmentation, multiplicity, duplication, independence, coordination, and domi- 25 nance. Most often, analysts leave these terms undefined, or only loosely defined; therefore, they are used inconsistently and deployed to support empirically unsupported claims about metropolitan organization and politics. E. Ostrom and her colleagues operationalized duplication as the number of consuming units in a metropolitan area that regularly receive a particular service 30 from more than one producer. They carefully pointed out, as well, that where one producer alternates with another in time, space, or clientele, there is no duplication. Similarly, duplication cannot be said to occur where two or more producers coordinate in providing a service to a consuming unit. Employing the concept of a public service industry developed earlier (V. Ostrom and E. Ostrom 35 1965), E. Ostrom and her colleagues found little duplication in police patrolling, criminal investigations, adult detentions, and crime-lab services in the metropolitan areas of Fayetteville and Durham, North Carolina, and Hamilton-Middletown, Ohio. Instead, non-duplicative patterns, including coordination, were more prevalent. 40 The authors argued that fragmentation, multiplicity, and duplication are among the defining characteristics of federalism and that coordination, independence, and Editor’s Note 3 dominance are additional features of interorganizational structures. The perfor- mance of federal systems can be assessed only if we can analyze different patterns of interorganizational arrangements with ‘‘consistent, well defined, and operational measures’’ (p. 107). 5 This work has had enduring value and provides insights into choices made by local officials and citizens in metropolitan areas, choices that usually support polycentricity rather than centricity. For example, a survey of elected and appointed local officials in western Pennsylvania found that 60 percent or more of the surveyed officials—including members of the International City/County 10 Management Association and officials with master’s degrees in public administra- tion or public policy—indicated an unwillingness to participate in a tax-base sharing arrangement or in a metropolitan council of governments (COG) that would require all members to participate fully in all programs approved by a majority of the COG’s members (Miller and Cox 2014). The authors’ dismay at 15 these survey results indicates that conceptualizations of metropolitan areas and their optimal organization continue to be contested in the academic literature. Elinor’s later work focused on common-pool resources such as fisheries, forests, grazing lands, oil fields, and water systems. She became best known and most influential for her book, Governing the Commons (E. Ostrom 1990), which sets 20 forth principles for determining the success or failure of local systems for managing common-pool resources. E. Ostrom will also be long remembered for developing two related analytic frameworks for social science: institutional analysis and design (IAD) and social-ecological systems (SES) analysis. Vincent Ostrom’s Work in Publius 25 V. Ostrom wrote frequently for Publius, in part because of his friendship with Daniel J. Elazar, founder of the journal. Both shared an interest in federalism and covenant as principles suited to human freedom and democratic self-government. The following articles by V. Ostrom are included in this virtual issue in a sequence that first features his more theoretical works on federalism followed by more 30 applied research dealing with contemporary issues of his day. V. Ostrom’sTheoretical Works The more theoretical articles are as follows: Ostrom, Vincent. 1973. Can federalism make a difference? Publius 3 (2): 197–237. Ostrom, Vincent. 1979. Dewey and federalism: So near and yet so far. Publius 9 (4): 35 87–101. Ostrom, Vincent. 1980. Hobbes, covenant, and constitution. Publius 10 (4): 83–100. 4 Editor’s Note Ostrom, Vincent. 1985. The meaning of federalism in The Federalist: A critical examination of the Diamond theses. Publius 15 (1): 1–21. Ostrom, Vincent. 1990. An inquiry concerning liberty and equality in the American constitutional system. Publius 20 (2): 33–52. 5 In ‘‘The Meaning of Federalism in The Federalist,’’ V. Ostrom challenged several conclusions reached by Martin Diamond (1961) in his famous analyses of federalism in The Federalist. Put most simply, Diamond suggested that use of the word ‘‘federal’’ in The Federalist means what we today understand to be 10 ‘‘confederal.’’ Thus, when James Madison wrote in Federalist 39 that the proposed constitution was neither national nor federal, ‘‘but a composition of both,’’ he meant, according to Diamond, that it was neither a unitary national form of government nor a confederal form of government. Ostrom agreed that the authors of The Federalist often used ‘‘confederal’’ and ‘‘federal’’ as synonyms but that this 15 use was not always so. Therefore, he disputed Diamond’s formulation that there are three forms of government—confederal, federal, and unitary-national—and that the United States represents the middle ‘‘federal’’ form. In turn, he disagreed with Diamond’s conclusion that ‘‘the great teaching of The Federalist is not how to be federal in a better way, but how to be better by being less federal’’ (1961, 40). 20 V. Ostrom’s analysis points out that Alexander Hamilton did not view confederation as a form of government at all; on the contrary, he saw it as a contradictory absurdity based on erroneous assumptions. Diamond contended that Hamilton’s discussion of federalism in Federalist 9 where he advanced this argument is ‘‘perhaps deliberately misleading’’ (1961, 24), but Ostrom maintained 25 that it is not misleading and that Hamilton, unlike Diamond, did