Obituary: Elinor Ostrom

Elinor Ostrom died of cancer on 12 June 2012. She was the first woman to be awarded, in 2009, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences for Economic Sciences – the ‘Nobel Prize for Economics’ – together with Oliver Williamson. Both scholars contributed to reviving New Institutional Economics by studying how institutions shape and constrain economic, social and political choices. She taught both at Indiana University, Bloomington, where she was senior Research Director of the Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory, and at Arizona State University, Tempe, where she was founding director of the Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity.

Her life was one of breaking many records. Elinor Ostrom was born into a Los Angeles family during the Great Depression, but managed to attend a good high school. When she decided that she would go to college (the first woman in her family) and tried to get into both the Economics and the Political Science departments at UCLA, her decision was met with resistance both inside and outside her family. She eventually succeeded and received a B.A. (with honors) in Political Science at UCLA, in 1954. Later she was one of only four women admitted to a graduate program in Political Science at UCLA, where she obtained both an M.A. in 1962 and a PhD in 1965. In her own biography she remarks how women, at the time, were not expected really to aim at much more than a well-paid clerical job or, at most, a position in a city college. “I learned not to take initial rejections as being permanent obstacles to moving ahead”, she remarks. And so she did. She studied the water industry in southern California based on theories developed by Vincent Ostrom, Charles Tiebout, and Robert Warren and wrote her dissertation on the problems of common-pool resources. Only later, in 1965, did Russel Hardin publish his seminal ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ article and Mancur Olson his Logic of Collective Action book. She later met and married political theorist Vincent Ostrom and eventually moved to Indiana where she first taught American Government, but later joined Vincent in their world-famous workshop.

After the landmark 1990 The Tragedy of the Commons volume, her second most-famous book is probably Understanding Institutional Diversity of 2005, the topic on which she held a widely attended and stimulating keynote speech at the ECPR Joint Sessions at St. Gallen in 2011, which was published in the ECPR’s house journal, European Political Science under the title, ‘Why do we need to protect institutional diversity?’ (Vol. 11, no. 1, March 2012, pp. 126-47).

Elinor Ostrom will be widely missed in the political science community and the ECPR wishes to acknowledge her outstanding and influential scholarship over the past few decades.

Keywords: Governance