RESEARCH HIGHLIGHT:CONSTITUTIONAL ARTISANS
This article, co-authored with Paul Lewis and published in Constitutional Political Economy, examines the relationship between the work of James Buchanan and Vincent Ostrom.
The article adds to existing work on Buchanan and Vincent Ostrom by providing a comprehensive analysis of their changing views about how the ‘logical foundations of constitutional democracy’ should be conceptualised.
The paper traces how in the 1960s and 1970s Ostrom took inspiration from the rational choice analysis of constitutional democracy in Buchanan and Tullock’s The Calculus of Consent. We show how it shaped Vincent’s reading of key texts in political theory and his analysis of public administration. We then discuss how Buchanan subsequently drew on Ostrom’s notion of artifactual man in developing his understanding of the ‘constitutional attitude’ necessary for individuals to engage in institutional design. We then explores how, from the mid-to-late 1990s, Ostrom became increasingly critical of Buchanan’s reliance on rational choice theory for his analysis of constitutional decision-making; we identify this as a key difference between their views.