Economics Nobel for a political scientist

seems to be a step in the right direction. From the Crooked Timber post The Ostrom Nobel :
"This is, as Kieran suggests, a vote in favor of detailed, working-from-the-ground-up, empirical work, which doesn’t rely on sharply contoured theoretical simplifications and flashy statistical techniques so much as the accumulation of good data, which reflects the messiness of the real social institutions from which it is gathered. Quoting from Governing the Commons:


"An important challenge facing policy scientists is to develop theories of human organization based on realistic assessment of human capabilities and limitations in dealing with a variety of situations that initially share some or all aspects of a tragedy of the commons. … Theoretical inquiry involves a search for regularities … As a theorist, and at times a modeler, I see these efforts [as being] at the core of a policy science. One can, however, get trapped in one’s own intellectual web. When years have been spent in the development of a theory with considerable power and elegance, analysts obviously will want to apply this tool to as many situations as possible. The power of a theory is exactly proportionate to the diversity of situations it can explain. All theories, however, have limits. Models of a theory are limited still further because many parameters must be fixed in a model, rather than allowed to vary. Confusing a model – such as that of a perfectly competitive market – with the theory of which it is one representation can limit applicability still further. (pp.24-25)"

One plausible characterization of her life’s work is that it is about demonstrating the empirical weaknesses of a ‘cute’ economic model (the Tragedy of the Commons) that assumed a role in policy discussions far out of proportion to its actual explanatory power, and replacing it with a set of explanations that are nowhere near as neat, but are far more true to the real world.....

It is also a vote in favor of supplementing quantitative work with qualitative understanding – Lin spends a lot of time (albeit less than she used to) in the field, soaking up practical knowledge which informs her work in striking ways. She is hands-on in a way that very few economists, political scientists or sociologists are. It is also interesting to note that the Nobel committee pays specific attention to the political implications of her work.


"Elinor Ostrom has challenged the conventional wisdom that common property is poorly managed and should be either regulated by central authorities or privatized. Based on numerous studies of user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes, and groundwater basins, Ostrom concludes that the outcomes are, more often than not, better than predicted by standard theories."

This reflects what she and her husband Vincent refer to as “polycentricity,” a normative approach to governance which stresses the degree to which higher levels of government should not crowd out self-organization at lower levels. Her work implies that both pure marketization and top-down government control can have badly adverse consequences for resource management, because they rob individuals of the capacity to govern themselves, and because they both lead to the depletion of important forms of local collective knowledge."

Many more links in Mark Thoma's post: Oliver Williamson and Elinor Ostrom Awarded Nobel in Economics,in Marginal Revolution What this Nobel prize means. See the trancript of interviews Rethinking Institutional Analysis: Interviews with Vincent and Elinor Ostrom .
P.S. I did not get any feel for the work of the other winner Oliver E. Williamson. Bruce Wilder in the comments to the above mentioned post by Mark Thoma suggested that Williamson formulated important problems but did not make much headway towards solution. A survey article by Williamson "The Economics of Governance" ia available online. More information in Financial Times.