Bloomington School

Definition

The Bloomington School of Public Choice and Institutional Theory, created by Elinor Ostrom, corecipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Economics, and Vincent Ostrom, co-founder of the Public Choice movement, has contributed to the theory of collective action, the analysis of metropolitan administration, the governance theory, the theory of goods and their production, the empirical study of natural resources management and of the commons, the nature and role of social norms, and the problems of constitutional political economy and institutional design. It also advanced significant methodological contributions to the study of polycentric, multilevel, dynamic institutional arrangements. In addition to the empirical, theoretical and methodological research, the Bloomington school has been associated to a broader philosophy of social order and change centered on the “human condition” and the artifactual reality created by fallible but capable human beings in their process of...