Vincent Ostrom’s Contributions to Political Economy

This article describes Vincent Ostrom’s 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, and Tocqueville 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 "Lin" Ostrom, developed theory and empirical work that led to Elinor receiving the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2009.