Updated: July 8, 2014
PBPL 828: Theory of Democratic Institutions
Fall Semester, 2014
Time: 6:30-9:30 pm, Tuesday
Office: MCEC 283a
Office phone: ext. 4236
Email: Michael.fotos@trincoll.edu
Instructor: Mike Fotos
Place: MC-307
Office hrs.: 2-5pm, Tu
Cell phone: (860)690-8614
PBPL 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. They
will 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, anthropology,
and psychology. Disciplinary specialization rewards scholars for knowing more-and-more about
less-and-less and as a consequence we gain detailed understandings of ever-more particular
aspects of human affairs while our relative ignorance of the whole grows ever greater. The
problem that we are all “learned ignoramuses” afflicts the study of democracy just as it does all
studies of human affairs. This course attempts to compensate for the limits of human
understanding in 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 three ways of getting to know political
institutions. Niall Ferguson’s synopsis of contemporary institutional performance in the AngloAmerican democracies frames the topic as an economic historian would encounter it. The second
approach, Vincent Ostrom’s epistemology of political inquiry takes a deeper theoretical cut by
employing Enlightenment reasoning to “contest” conventional, present-day theories of
government. Ostrom demonstrates his method of inquiry by articulating a theory of federalism
and applying it to American experiments in limited constitutional government, notably critiquing
the continuing, apparently inexorable, centralization and nationalization of policy and
1
administration. The third is James Scott’s critical examination of states as instruments for
controlling nature and human society by processes of information collection and social and
ecological simplification. We complete the course with a study of disaster preparedness and
emergency management policy that illuminates the readings in political theory by providing
opportunities to compare the claims of theory to U.S. security policy in the post-9/11 era.
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 uncertainty
underlie 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 from the 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 adequate
policy theory, defined as testable propositions concerning the relationship between the
ordering of words in sentences and stipulated structures of events that 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
adequate policy theory, it is more productive to conceptualize such events as “foreseeable
but unanticipated consequences of the rules in use.”
Useful theory has the capacity to reveal the hidden structure of social order or to explain
outcomes that are counter-intuitive or counter-intentional to naïve examination. Naïve
examination is synonymous with weak theory.
Presuming that any public official or agency is omnicompetent or impervious to human
imperfection is a fantasy. Presuming that any expert observer (including oneself) is
omniscient is delusional.
Attempts at policy reform frequently go awry because we overestimate the rationality of
bureaucracy and underestimate the rationality of bureaucrats.
2








Many (probably most) public goods and services are co-produced. In other words, public
goods production requires particular forms of cooperation between citizens and their
designated agents, e.g., producing public safety requires active good relations between
citizens and local police.
Robust policy designs frequently take advantage of or foster conditions for the
development of mutually constructive co-production relationships.
Humans are rarely (if ever) perfectly rational, but the principle of relative advantage
offers a robust predictive heuristic (a rule-of-thumb) for how individuals are likely to act
or choose when presented with specifiable choice situations.
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 the public agents charged
with delivering authorized services and the citizens who are the presumed beneficiaries of
public services.
Institutions contain systems of power and systems for processing information.
Institutional performance depends on both.
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 Elinor Ostrom Workshop 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 http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PNABM798.pdf.
Required of all students:
Niall Ferguson (2012) The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die,
New York: Penguin Group. ISBN: 978-0-14-312552-5 (pbk.)
Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein (2014) They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic
Writing (3rd edition), New York: W. W. Norton and Co. ISBN: 978-0-393-93584-4
(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, 3rd ed.
Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. ISBN 13: 978-0-8173-5462-6
3
James Scott (1998) Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition
Have Failed, New Haven: Yale University Press. eISBN: 9780300128789
pISBN: 9780300078152
Richard Sylves (2008) Disaster Policy & Politics: Emergency Management and Homeland
Security, Washington: CQ Press. ISBN: 978-0-87289-460-0
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 demonstrate to me by your
writing in this course that have read and taken to heart the respective authors’ prescriptions.
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
Or
Stanley E. Fish (2011) How to Write a Sentence: and How to Read One, New York: HarperCollins. ISBN: 978-0-06-184053-1 (paperback)
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 account and 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 2): Course overview, introduction to constitutional choice and writing about
politics
Read in class: Syllabus, selected passages from The Declaration, The Preamble, The
Federalist No. 37, “They Say/I Say” (Preface) and “Politics and the English Language”
Week 2 (September 9): The problematic quest to understand human affairs
Required: The Federalist No. 37; “Re-thinking Thinking,” from The Economist, Ostrom
(1980) “Artisanship and Artifact;” Fotos (manuscript) “A typology of facts and three axioms of
artisanship;” F. A. Hayek (1945) “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” The American Economic
Review, 35(Sept.):519-30; Karl Popper (1967) “The Rationality Principle;” Intellectual Crisis
4
(Foreword by Barbara Allen, Preface to 3rd edition); Scott (1998) Seeing Like a State
(Introduction, chapter 9); They Say/I Say (Preface, Introduction)
Week 3 (September 16): Explaining the problem of social order (and attempts to solve it)
Required: The Federalist No.’s 1 & 23; V. Ostrom (1991) The Meaning of American
Federalism (Foreword by Robert B. Hawkins, Jr., chapter 10); von Mises (1998 [1940])
Interventionism: An Economic Analysis (Introduction); Ferguson (2012) The Great Degeneration
(Introduction); Scott (1998) Seeing Like a State (Chapter 1); North, Wallis, and Weingast (2006)
“A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History;” They Say/I Say (“They
say” & “Her point is”)
Week 4 (September 23): Sustaining democratic social orders (Psst! It’s a problem.)
Required: Tocqueville (1840) Democracy in America, Vol. II (Section 2, chapter 1,
Section 4, chapters 2, 3, & 6); V. Ostrom (1991) The Meaning of American Federalism (chapter
5); Ferguson (2012) The Great Degeneration (chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, and Conclusion); Robert
Putnam (1995-96) “Tuning In, Tuning Out;” Review of Diminished Democracy: From
Membership to Management in American Civic Life by Theda Skocpol (2003) by Elisabeth S.
Clemens at http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/0022195054741389; They Say/I Say
(“As he himself puts it”)
Week 5 (September 30): American federalism as a theory of social order
Required: The Federalist No.’s 10 & 51; Tocqueville (1835) Democracy In America,
Vol. I (Introduction); V. Ostrom (1991) The Meaning of American Federalism (chapters 1, 2, 3, 4,
& 8); King (1955) “Letter from Birmingham Jail;” They Say/I Say (“Yes/no/okay/but” & “And
yet”)
Week 6 (October 7): The mainstream of public administration theory and the political economy
approach
Required: V. Ostrom (2008) Intellectual Crisis (chapters 1, 2, & 3); V. Ostrom (1991)
The Meaning of American Federalism (chapters 6 &7); Hindmoor (2006) Rational Choice
(chapter 6); They Say/I Say (“Skeptics may object” & “So what? Who cares?”)
Week 7 (October 14): Trinity Days, no class, turn in the list of sources for the Annotated
Bibliography at 9:00am.
Required: Graff and Birkenstein (2014) “The Say/I Say” (all of the remainder)
Week 8 (October 21): A vision of liberty (and polycentric order)
Required: Tocqueville (1835) Democracy in America, Vol. I (chapter 5); Peterson (1981)
City Limits (chapter 2 “The Interests of the Limited City); V. Ostrom (1991) The Meaning of
American Federalism (chapter 9); V. Ostrom (2008) Intellectual Crisis (chapters 4 & 5); Scott
(1998) Seeing Like a State (chapter 2); Douglass (1876) “Oration on the Unveiling of the
Freedman’s Monument”
Week 9 (October 28): Visions of authority (and monocentric order)
Required: Scott (1998) Seeing Like a State (chapters 3, 4, 5, 6, & 7)
5
Week 10 (November 4): The Copernican Turn
Required: V. Ostrom (2008) Intellectual Crisis (chapters 6 & 7); Scott (1998) Seeing
Like a State (chapter 8 and conclusion); King (1963) “The Path to Non-Violence;” Michael
Munger (YouTube video—link on Moodle)
Week 11 (November 11): 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;” http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Situational+awareness;
Week 12 (November 18): 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 (in the Trinity film collection, also online)
Week 13 (November 25): 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”
Week 14 (December 2): Course wrap-up, (optional) class field trip
Required: readings TBA
Weekly memos on the assigned readings must be prepared in advance of class and
posted on Moodle no 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 short essay on political (or social) theory relevant to explaining your topic or
answering your question. The term-length project is an exercise that requires you to talk, use, and
6
do theory in service to the course objective of developing your capacity to think critically about
the way you think about social reality.
The topic statement and research question should 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 your present expectations of how you intend to apply the tools of institutional
theory to the topic. 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. Most topic statements are 400 to 700 words
long plus a preliminary list of references you have consulted or expect you might wish to consult
in the course of completing the project.
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 literature 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 short essay on relevant theory should be 1000-1500 (four to six pages, doublespaced, 12 pt. Times New Roman font) words long and no longer. The short essay assignment
also includes your topic description, a revised and improved version of your research question (or
questions), and a list of sources cited. The list of sources does not count against the length limit.
A successful essay tells a story (grounded in the professional literature) about the
development of theory relevant to your topic and explains or evaluates how political theory (or
social theory generally) informs investigations of your topic or question(s). Your essay should
demonstrate that you have read and thought about the uses and limitations of relevant theory for
explaining, comparing, or evaluating political institutions, events, or behavior, for illuminating
key variables that influence the phenomena you wish to study, or for stipulating testable
propositions (i.e., hypotheses) that would serve as the foundation of further investigation. Notice
where the words “and” and “or” appear in the previous sentence. Warrantable theory serves
several useful purposes and while you are obliged to read and think about them, you do not have
the obligation to formulate a theory or write an essay that addresses all. An implied expectation
7
of this assignment is that you practice thinking like an editor with respect to your own scholarly
output.
Students who wish to use the term length project to explore prospective topics for their
final research projects are encouraged to do so. If you think you might want to do this, please
contact me for further discussion of this option.
Important Dates
September 16: Topic statement and research question due at the beginning of class
October 14: List of sources for annotated bibliography due at 9:00am.
November 11: Annotated bibliographies due at the beginning of class
December 2: Short essay on political theory due at the beginning of class
Other dates to remember: Weekly memos on the required readings will be due on 9/8, 9/15,
9/22, 9/29, 10/6, 10/20, 10/27, 11/3, 11/10, 11/17, 11/24.
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 resubmit it at the next class meeting to receive full credit. If you get a “do-over” grade on a
weekly memo, that means you have one week to re-write the memo for credit. If you do not
satisfactorily complete the do-over in one week and turn it in on or before the next class meeting,
you will receive a zero for that particular memo.
Everyone is entitled to one “freebie” on his or her weekly memos. You may use your
freebie for any reason. The freebie policy means you can let one, and only one, of your memo
due dates go by without submitting a memo 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.
All written assignments must be laser printed (or typed), double or 1.5 spaced, in tenpoint font or larger, using a readily legible font style. I smile upon clarity of expression, good
grammar, and fastidious spelling. If it’s a close call between a B+ and an A-, a well-written
8
assignment gets the benefit of the doubt. I assume everyone has a good dictionary, spell-check
and word-count software, and a well-thumbed style manual.
“If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well,
others will do their thinking for them.”1
Intellectual honesty is more than just an abstract goal. The Student Handbook discusses
Trinity College policy on cheating and plagiarism. You are responsible for knowing and
following school policy and the nine rules of Intellectual Honesty found in the Student Handbook.
I will punish violations of that policy. You should also be on notice that I reserve the right to
submit an essay or paper to the web-based vendor that Trinity College has retained for checking
student submissions against papers that can be purchased on-line or down-loaded from the
Internet.
The Preamble to the Integrity Contract applies to all students:
“We, the students of Trinity College, believe that as individual undergraduates we must
assume responsibility for upholding our standards of academic integrity and social conduct. This
document articulates those standards upon which the Trinity community can promote an
atmosphere of mutual trust and respect in which scholarly work and learning thrive. With this
document the Trinity College student body, in accordance with the mission statement of the
College, declares its commitment to a code of honor that fosters moral growth and upholds
academic and personal integrity. By signing this document, each matriculated student commits
to act with honor and integrity at Trinity College.”
Course Grades
Grades will be weighted as follows:
Class attendance and participation
25 points
Weekly memos
25 points
Term-length project
50 points
(apportioned as follows)
Topic statement
10 points
Bibliography
20 points
Completed project
20 points
End of Syllabus
1
Attributed to George Orwell, http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/3706.George_Orwell?page=3
(June 13, 2014)
9