Updated: August 25, 2013

PBPL 828: Theory of Democratic Institutions

Fall Semester, 2013Instructor: Mike Fotos

Time: 6:30-9:30 pm, TuesdayPlace: TBD

Office: MCEC 283aOffice hrs.:2-5pm, Tu

Office phone: ext. 4236Cell phone: (860)690-8614

Email: BPL office fax: 297-5358

Purpose, learning objectives, and course outline

The course finds its purpose in the unfinished project that Alexander Hamilton describes in Federalist No. 1,

It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.

Students who successfully complete this course will have a vocabulary in political theory and knowledge of cases from which to make an informed answer to Hamilton’s question. Theywill also have practice in writing about this and related questions of political theory and American public policy.

In PBPL 828, you will encounter the work of 20th century political economists who have tried to shed light on the problems of constituting a self-governing society by re-joining the modern offshoots of 18th century moral philosophy. We know those fields of study today by the disciplinary titles of political science, economics, public administration, sociology, and psychology. Disciplinary specialization rewards scholars for knowing more-and-more about less-and-less and as a consequence we gain detailed understandings ofever-more particular aspects of human affairswhile our relative ignorance of the whole grows ever greater. The problem that we are all, to some extent, “learned ignoramuses” afflicts the study of democracy just as it does all studies of human affairs. This course attemptsto compensate for the limits of human understandingin an era of information overload by promoting the practice of thinking critically about the way we think about social reality. You should expect that the attempt, like all human attempts at comprehension, will itself be tentative and incomplete.

The course begins with epistemology, an imposing word that stands for a simple concept. If you want to study something and learn useful bits about it, you’re better off employing an adequate way of getting to know it. We’ll read about two ways of getting to know political institutions. The first is a sprawling body of modern political and economic inquiry called the rationality project. The second is Vincent Ostrom’s epistemology of political inquiry, which employs Enlightenment reasoning to “contest” conventional, present-day theories of government. Ostromdemonstrates his method of inquiry by articulating a theory of federalism and applying it to American experiments in limited constitutional government.

We then apply our newly acquired understanding of rationality and federal theory to the examination of Paul Peterson’s theory ofthe political economy of municipal government. Peterson’s work provides an opportunity to think about governing units with limited grants of authority and how they operate as parts of a self-governing whole. Throughout the course, students will be challenged to adopt the expanded vocabulary of political theory noted above. Help is at hand, courtesy of Ostromand Peterson,Andrew Hindmoor, F. A. Hayek,William Riker, P.D. Aligica, and Peter Boettke. These authors lead us through a list of concepts and puzzles that modern theorists have attended to. The main event isOstrom’s critique of public administration theory and his call for a “Copernican turn” in the way we think about political theory. We complete the course with a studyof disaster preparedness and response management that illuminates issues raised in the course readings and that provides opportunities to apply the methods of theoretical inquiry covered at earlier stages in the course.

The course assumes that students understand the primary concepts and basic vocabulary of microeconomics. The course further assumes that students have a comfortable familiarity with the study of politics, political institutions, or public policy. The course is non-quantitative in its design and your math skills (or lack thereof) will not affect your course grade.

As the course unfolds, certain themes will emerge, recur, or take on different meanings or shades of importance. For illustration and introduction, here are several.

  • Fallibility and learning are intrinsic to human experience. Learning is the source of uncertainty in human society. Error correction and the desire to reduce uncertaintyunderlie our efforts to establish rule-ordered relationships.
  • Understanding the terms and conditions of governance requires the use and development of political theory.
  • Politics, policy, and political theory are inseparable fromthe way we use language. We understand rules and rule-ordered relationships only by understanding the concepts, verbal operators, and grammar upon which they are built.
  • Efforts to establish or extend rule-ordered relationships in any society exhibit the characteristics of political experiments. Every rule depends for its validity on testable propositions concerning the relationship between the ordering of words in sentences and stipulated structures of events believed to occur in society.
  • Political outcomes are governed by cause-and-effect relationships but political designs do not lend themselves to theoretical(or quantitative) simplification in the manner of the natural sciences.
  • Creative, fallible, yet adaptive individuals are the fundamental agents, the micro-motors, of human society.
  • As a consequence, political outcomes are subject to uncertainty and are liable to be counter-intuitive or counter-intentional to initial preferences or expectations.
  • Unintended consequences attend every human action. For the purpose of developing theories of governance, it is more fruitful to conceive of such events as “foreseeable but unanticipated consequences of the rules in use.”
  • Useful theory has the capacity to reveal or explain outcomes that are counter-intuitive or counter-intentional to naïve examination (synonymous with weak theory).
  • Presuming that any public official or agency is omnicompetentor impervious to human imperfection is a fantasy. Presuming that any expert observer (including oneself) is omniscient is delusional.
  • Attempts at policy reformfrequently go awry because we overestimate the rationality of bureaucracy and underestimate the rationality of bureaucrats.
  • Many (probably most) public goods and services are co-produced. In other words, production requires cooperation between citizens and their designated agents, e.g., public safety, neighborhood watch groups, and local police.
  • Robust policy designs frequently take advantage of or foster conditions for the development of mutually constructive co-production relationships.
  • Comparative advantage among differing organizational forms applies to the choice of rules and institutions. With respect to particular baskets of public goods, some sets of rules and institutions work better, some work less well, some don’t work at all, and some are perverse, i.e., they create pathological relations between citizens and the public agents charged with delivering authorized services.
  • All choices among policies and rules require making tradeoffs among different baskets of public goods and among different distributional outcomes.
  • Self-governing, democratic systems are inherently polycentric. That is, they are defined by multiple, overlapping, and limited centers of legitimate public authority. Monocentric visions of public authority and power occupy the opposite, anti-democratic pole.
  • Conditions of political inequality exist in all rule-ordered relationships which are defined by the “rule-ruler-ruled” condition. In self-governing systems, the ruler-ruled relationship exhibits the property of “power-with” in contrast to authoritarian systems where the ruler-ruled relationship exhibits the property of “power-over.”

Required Readings(all ordered through the Trinity Bookstore or posted on Moodle. Note: Through a special arrangement with The Vincent and ElinorOstromWorkshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University, the professor has a limited quantity of loaner copies of The Meaning of American Federalism. This book is also available as a free pdf download at .

Required of all students:

Andrew Hindmoor (2006) Rational Choice, New York: PalgraveMacMillan. ISBN-10: 1-4039-3422-3 (pbk)

Paul E. Peterson (1981) City Limits, Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press. ISBN: 0-226-66293-4 (pbk)

Vincent Ostrom (1994) The Meaning of American Federalism: Constituting a Self-Governing Society, San Francisco: ICS Press. ISBN 1-55815-393-4

Vincent Ostrom (2008) The Intellectual Crisis in American Public Administration, 3rded. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. ISBN 13: 978-0-8173-5462-6

Richard Sylves (2008) Disaster Policy & Politics: Emergency Management and Homeland Security, Washington: CQ Press. ISBN: 978-0-87289-460-0

Recommended for all students:

Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein (2010) They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing (2nd edition), New York: W. W. Norton and Co.

If you do not already own and regularly consult a good manual for English style and composition, I expect you will acquire one of the following and make regular use of it in this course.

William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White (2000)The Elements of Style (4th edition), New York: Longman Publishers. ISBN: 0-205-30902-X (paperback)

Or

Joseph M. Williams revised by Gregory G. Colomb (2012)Style:The Basics of Clarity and Grace (4th edition), Boston: Longman. ISBN-10: 0-204-83076-5

Course Assignments

The following assignments are required of all students enrolled in the course.

Class participation is very important. We learn as much from each other as we do from the readings. You cannot participate in class discussions without doing the required readings. On a weekly basis, I will pose discussion questions to guide your reading and memo writing. Even if you do not happen to write on a particular question, I expect you to keep a record of the discussion questions and your thoughts and reflections relevant to the questions and the respective week’s readings.

A valid email accountand a web browser able to access Trinity’s “Moodle” web application are required to remain current with weekly assignments, lecture notes, class announcements and other important information. You are responsible for everything posted by me on Moodle or sent to you by email.

Weekly topics and readings(All readings are required unless otherwise noted.)

Week 1 (September 3): Course overview, introduction to rationality and constitutional choice

Read in class: Syllabus,“Re-thinking Thinking,” “Ostrom on Constitutional Fundamentals,” and “Stillman on ‘The Other American Constitution’”

Week 2 (September 10): The rationality project and Ostrom’s epistemology of political inquiry

Required: Hindmoor (Preface, chapters 1, 8 & 9); Ostrom “Artisanship and Artifact;” Meaning of Federalism (Foreword by Robert B. Hawkins, Jr., chapters 1 & 10)

Week 3 (September 17): American federalism as a theory of government

Required: Meaning of Federalism (chapters 2, 3, 4, & 8); Intellectual Crisis (Foreword by Barbara Allen, Preface to 3rd edition)

Week 4 (September 24): Cities and policy theory

Required: Peterson (Preface,chapters 1, 2, & 3); Meaning of Federalism (chapter 6)

Week 5 (October 1): City politics, political economy, and economic politics

Required: Peterson (chapters 4, 5, & 6); Meaning of Federalism (chapter 7);Hindmoor (chapter 2)

Week 6 (October 8): City politics and public choice theory

Required: Peterson (chapters 7, 8, & 9); Hindmoor (chapters 3 & 4); Riker “The Powell Amendment”

Week 7 (October 15): Trinity Days, no class, turn in the list of sources for the Annotated Bibliography at 9:00am.

Week 8 (October 22): Public goods, collective action, the New Institutionalism

Required: Intellectual Crisis (chapter 3) Hindmoor (chapters 5, 6, & 7);F. A. Hayek (1945) “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” The American Economic Review, 35(Sept.):519-30

Week 9 (October 29): The mainstream of public administration theory and the bureaucratic state

Required: Intellectual Crisis (chapters 1, 2, 4, & 5)

Week 10 (November 5): The Copernican Turn

Required: Meaning of Federalism (chapters 5 & 9); Intellectual Crisis (chapters 6 & 7)

Week 11 (November 12): Theory meets practice (or “Bambi meets Godzilla”)

Required: Sylves (preface, chapters 1, 2 & 3);9/11 Commission report (chapters 1, 8 & 9); A nation still unprepared, chapter 5;

Online resources (all required): “Cheap Irony;” “Don’t worry about it;” “Katrina, what the media missed;”

Week 12 (November 19): The Presidential system in practice

Required: Sylves (chapters 4, 5, 6 & 7); 9/11 Commission report (chapters 10 &11); A nation still unprepared, Executive Summary, chapters 11, 12, 13

View required film: Trouble the water (on reserve, also available on Netflix)

Week 13 (November 26): Back to the future?

Required: Sylves (chapters 8 & 9); 9/11 Commission report (chapters 12 & 13); A nation still unprepared, Executive Summary, chapters 14 19, 27, Overview, Findings, Recommendations; “The Wal-Mart Way”

View recommended film: When the levees broke (especially Act 3, on reserve)

Week 14 (December 3): Course wrap-up, (optional) class field trip

Required: AligicaBoettke “The Two Social Philosophies of Ostroms’ Institutionalism”

Weekly memos on the assigned readings must be prepared in advance of class and posted on Moodleno later than 9:00am on the day before class meets. The memos have three purposes, all beneficial to you. They allow you to demonstrate that you have done the reading, which helps your grade for class participation. They allow you to formulate questions or pose problems that may be relevant to your term-length project or other independent research. They are great study notes to use when you wish to cite course readings in papers you may happen to prepare for other courses.

The term-length project

The term-length project is a formal research assignment. It must be original work, conceived and carried out by you. All sources must be properly footnoted. If you have any questions about how to use and cite sources, use the “CiteSource” link on the Trinity Library web page or contact Erin Valentino, the reference librarian who supports the public policy program. Improper documentation of your sources will hurt your grade. Plagiarism or any other form of academic dishonesty will kill it.

The term-length project is a three-part assignment. The first part is your topic statement and research question. The second is the annotated bibliography. The third is the submission of the completed paper.

The topic statement and research question should be three or so pages long. It must include a detailed description of the topic, text, or events you intend to discuss in your final paper. References to texts you will be using should be properly footnoted, of course. The topic statement should also include a discussion of how you intend to apply the tools of institutional theory to the topic and a preliminary list of references you intend to consult. Obviously, the topic statement is a preliminary document and the finished product will differ. The purpose of this short assignment is for us to begin the collaboration necessary to assure that your final paper succeeds.

All students will prepare an annotated bibliography based on a directed reading of relevant professional literature. If you are a graduate student, the bibliography must include at least ten sources. If you are an undergraduate, it must contain at least five. All sources used in the annotated bibliography for credit toward your grade must be approved by the course instructor (that’s me).

Required readings listed on this syllabus or in other Trinity public policy courses may not be used for credit in this assignment. You may consult published literature reviews on your topic, but a lit-review counts as only one source. Your bibliography must provide the following information and analysis concerning each of your sources: a statement of the question or problem that most concerns the author(s), a brief summary of the research question(s) or hypothesis(es) that is/are most salient to your topic of inquiry, the research method(s) used by the author(s), and key findings or conclusions. Your annotated bibliography must also include an introduction explaining the reason(s) for your selection of the sources cited and a concluding essay of a page or so that summarizes the cumulative contribution to knowledge of the literature reviewed and your thoughts on what remains to be discovered. The bibliography should be 2500-3000 words long for graduates and about half that for undergrads.

The completed project should be 1500-2000 words long and no longer. The completed project must include your topic description, a revised and improved version of your research question (or questions), a discussion of how the professional literature addresses the development of theory relevant to your topic, a discussion of relevant theory, and the implications of theory for answering your question(s). The discussion is very important. To make an A on this assignment, you must demonstrate that you have read and thought about the uses and limitations of relevant political theory for explaining political institutions, events, or behavior. Graduate students may wish to use the term length project to explore prospective topics for their final research projects. This option requires the instructor’s permission which is readily granted. Please see me for a more detailed discussion of this option.

Important Dates

September 17: Topic statement and research question due at the beginning of class

October 15: List of sources for annotated bibliography due at 9:00am.

November 12: Annotated bibliographies due at the beginning of class

December 3: Completed project due at the beginning of class

Other dates to remember: Weekly memos on the required readings will be due on 9/9, 9/16,

9/23, 9/30, 10/7, 10/21, 10/28, 11/4, 11/11, 11/18, 11/25.

General information

I welcome your phone calls, emails, and personal visits. By prior arrangement, I can usually meet at The Cave before class. I try to avoid email on weekends, but I try to reply within 24 hours during the work week. The best way to reach me by telephone is by cell. My cell phone number is (860)690-8614. Please try not to call after 10:00pm or before 7:00am.

The penalty for late assignments, other than weekly memos, is one-half of the value of the assignment.

Late weekly memos will not be accepted. Even if you join the course in the second week, you are still responsible for every memo. Weekly memos are graded as either acceptable or not. If you turn a memo in on time and it is graded as not acceptable, you may re-write and re-submit it at the next class meeting to receive full credit. Everyone is entitled to one “freebie” on his or her weekly memos. That means you can let one, and only one, of your memos slide with no adverse consequences to your grade. You should however retain a note of each week’s memo question or questions for purposes that will become clear as the course continues. The freebie is intended to allow students to join the course in the second week with no penalty. If you join the course in the second week and (for totally understandable reasons) fail to bring a memo with you, you have thereupon used your freebie and no other will be granted.