2005 James Madison Award

Triennially awarded to recognize an American political scientist who has made a distinguished scholarly contribution to political science.

Committee:, Daniel Carpenter, Harvard University; Michael Jones-Correa, Cornell University; Elisabeth Gerber, University of Michigan, Chair.

Recipient: Elinor Ostrom, Indiana University-Bloomington

Citation:  Over her distinguished 40 year career, Professor Elinor Ostrom's scholarship has made a deep and lasting impact on the study of political, social, and economic institutions. Lin's work in institutional analysis has fundamentally influenced a generation (or two, or three) of scholars. She has provided a sound, compelling, and integrated framework for understanding collective action, resource management, property rights, and institutional design. She has published widely in political science, economics, public policy, and public administration. Her work is self-consciously interdisciplinary, speaking across disciplinary lines to deal with some of society's most vexing social problems - poverty, inequality, and sustainability -- in ways that neither political scientists, nor sociologists, nor economists, nor anthropologists would be pursuing without her influence. Her work is innovative and pioneering, taking on problems such as natural resource management that few political scientists had studied previously, developing fresh and inventive theoretical tools and analytical approaches, and then extending the work to a wide variety of settings and applications. Likewise, Lin's methodological approaches, which combine game theory, experimentation, field study, and formal institutional analysis, were just emerging in mainstream political science when she got started; she has done much to popularize these approaches in the last twenty years.

Lin's early work focused on urban politics, particularly on governance and service delivery in American cities. She wrote numerous influential papers and books on local government and especially on community policing, a concept which has regained popularity in urban reform circles today.

Her real groundbreaking work came, though, with the publication of Governing the Commons in 1990. This elegant book starts with a paradoxical observation: rational choice theory predicts that individual people, making individually rational choices, will over-use and ultimately destroy life-sustaining common pool resources (CPRs) unless an outside force (i.e., the state) intervenes to impose a draconian system of private property rights or a heavy regulatory regime that strictly limits individual behavior. In fact, we observe many communities constructing and maintaining governance institutions to manage their commonly shared resources in the absence of outside intervention. Through careful and extensive field research in a wide variety of settings, Lin explores the characteristics of successful and unsuccessful CPR institutions, positing a theory of institutional choice and survival that builds on basic tenants of rationality and basic observations about what people actually do. This book has fundamentally changed how political scientists think about collective action, institutional choice and self-governance, not only with respect to managing CPRs but in the context of a wide range of human interactions, and has been cited nearly 1,500 times.

Building on the basic framework developed in Governing the Commons, Lin and her colleagues have traveled the world, observing collective action, collecting massive amounts of data, and applying and refining her analytical approach to an ever-wider set of problems, cultures, and human experiences. Her work aggregates up to the conclusion that individuals and communities can and do often achieve cooperation in the pursuit of common benefits and in the face of daunting barriers. And they frequently do so in the absence of coercion.

Lin is a theorist, and she has done much to popularize the use of rational choice and game theory in political science. She is also an empiricist. One of her most significant methodological contributions has been to force theorists to take seriously the vast empirical research that demonstrates how people adapt to a complex and uncertain world, to challenge the validity of our theoretical assumptions, and to extend theory to better ground it in empirical observations.

She is also eclectic. Her body of work includes studies of such diverse topics as social capital, linguistics, culture, and complexity, and the impacts of these important concepts on governance.

Ostrom's influence within the discipline has been great. In addition to her published scholarship, she has had a deep and direct influence on hundreds of scholars, advising some 80 Ph.D. students, interfacing with more than 500 visiting scholars through the Workshop at Indiana, and serving the wider discipline through numerous professional associations, editorial boards, and the like.

Perhaps equally impressive has been her influence beyond the boundaries of political science. She is an ambassador, as it were, to other disciplines, offering the insights of institutional analysis to audiences across the social, natural, and policy sciences.

In recent years, Lin has become more and more involved in real policy debates, consulting with governments and NGOs in developing countries about resource management, governance, and local institutional design. She has endless energy and continues to produce amazing scholarship and to provide outstanding service to the discipline.