[-]Consider a series of studies conducted by the economist and political scientist Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues in the 1970s. These came at a time when academic and political opinion on local power was being tugged in two different directions. On one hand, there was a drive toward merging municipal governments and tightening their professional standards, moving away from the sorts of part-time work and volunteerism that many small communities rely on. On the other hand, a vocal group of dissidents—some on the right, while others came out of the New Left and black power movements—pushed hard for decentralization and community control. Ostrom, who would later win a Nobel Prize in economics, decided to put the arguments to an empirical test. The results helped convince her that highly centralized government was inferior to what she called polycentric systems, in which political units of varying size can cooperate but act independently, without a clear hierarchy. She felt this idea applied to the police as much as anyone else: While economies of scale might make it sensible for, say, a single crime lab to serve a large region, she felt it would be better for that lab to contract with many relatively small departments than to be an arm of one big one.[-] reason/archives/2014/12/17/the-wrong-solution
Posted on: Thu, 18 Dec 2014 09:09:38 +0000
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