Bloomington School

The Bloomington School, also Bloomington School of Public Choice or Indiana School, is a branch of economics and political science. Its best-known representatives are Vincent Ostrom and the Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom .

Teaching (overview)

• Avoiding simple dichotomies such as capitalism and socialism, not in the sense of a third way, but in the sense of emphasizing diverse mixed forms of "market" and "state",
• Rejection of a government or state conception that understands it as a uniform central “command structure”. Instead, the diverse forms of self-organization on various levels are emphasized ( polycentric law ) in the tradition of Alexis de Tocqueville and Friedrich von Hayek .
• Empirical Study

Theory history and development

1970s: Metropolitan Reform Debate

The Bloomington School emerged from a counter-movement to the Metropolitan Reform Movement of the 1970s: While the latter wanted to re-plan the administrative structures and units of metropolitan regions in a centralized manner , its representatives advocated the preservation of the existing, supposedly inefficient, redundant structures. Vincent Ostrom et al. empirical studies.

Elinor Ostrom: Governing the Commons

Elinor Ostrom's empirical study of the commons problem in Governing the Commons received worldwide attention . In 2009 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for this.

literature

Primary literature

• Vincent Ostrom, Charles M. Tiebout and Robert Warren: The Organization of Government in Metropolitan Areas: A Theoretical Inquiry . In: The American Political Science Review . Vol. 55, No. 4 , December 1961, p. 831–842 ( online (PDF; 2.1 MB)).

Secondary literature

• William C. Mitchell: Virginia, Rochester, and Bloomington: Twenty-five years of public choice and political science . In: Public Choice . tape 56 , no. February 2 , 1988, ISSN  0048-5829 , doi : 10.1007 / BF00115751 .
• Paul Dragos Aligica / Peter J. Boettke : Challenging Institutional Analysis and Development. The Bloomington School . Routledge, London 2009, ISBN 978-0-415-77821-3 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Vincent Ostrom, Charles M. Tiebout & Richard Warren: The organization of government in metropolitan areas: a theoretical inquiry . In: American Political Science Review, Vol. 55, 1961, pp. 831–842, article for download (PDF, 2.1 MB) ( Memento of the original from June 13, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . 
2. ^ Elinor Ostrom: Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1990, ISBN 0-521-37101-5 .