The Elinor Ostrom Lifetime Achievement Award
The Elinor Ostrom Lifetime Achievement Award is given every other year for sustained significant academic contributions to the field. This year’s winner was Pablo Spiller, the Jeffrey A. Jacobs Distinguished Professor in Business and Technology, Emeritus, at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.
In addition to being (a) the first ISNIE/SIOE conference organizer to have the conference dinner on a cruise boat, (b) the first ISNIE/SIOE President to be an expert at the tango, and (c) the first PhD economist born in Uruguay, Pablo also has made fundamental contributions to ISNIE/SIOE in three domains: intellectual, institutional, and interpersonal.
Intellectually, Pablo has made lasting contributions to three themes related to SIOE. The first theme, and the earliest focus in his research, concerns competition (and lack thereof). Here there are papers in IO, regulation, and antitrust. This theme is clearly related to SIOE, but in future work Pablo would not only move closer to SIOE’s core but even contribute to reshaping SIOE.
The second theme, and roughly the middle period of Pablo’s research, is very importantly in the core of SIOE because it combines Pablo’s economics research training and approach both with political science and with law. The overarching topic of this second theme is politics (with a small “p”) and the many politicians who practice it (basically, all of us). Here there are two papers in AJPS (one with the glorious title “Amateur legislators, professional politicians”) and others in law journals, with topics such as decision-making on the Supreme Court or a multiple-principals theory of regulation (acknowledging politicians and interest groups, as well as the regulator, as principals).
Finally, the third intellectual theme is commitment (and lack thereof), especially the institutional foundations of regulatory commitment. Whereas work in the second theme helped deepen the intersections in SIOE’s disciplinary Venn diagram, work in this third theme opened a new frontier for SIOE—a frontier very much in keeping with SIOE’s focus on law, political science, economics, and institutions. Indeed, like other powerful ideas, it soon became clear that this focus on commitment issues had legs—i.e., applications beyond the regulatory process, such as to contestability of not only public but also private contracts.
Turning to institutional contributions, of course Pablo served in the sequence of officer positions from Vice President to President-Elect to President, running the conference as President-Elect, but his contributions to complementary institutions were equally important. For example, Pablo was Editor-in-Chief of JLEO, and he ran the Williamson Seminar at Berkeley, and he co-founded and ran (with Stephane Saussier) the Berkeley-Paris (now Berkeley-Padua-Paris) conference in organizational economics (now in its eighth year).
Finally, and in some ways most important and most impressive, Pablo’s interpersonal contributions are extraordinary. The outpouring of warm and grateful testimonials both from scholars closely connected to Pablo and even from those relatively remote from him was notable—confirming Pablo Spiller has an eminently appropriate recipient of the Ostrom Award.
The Ronald H. Coase Dissertation Award
Roya Talibova (featured on the picture via video screen, while being honored by Federica Carugati) is the winner of the 2023 Award. Her dissertation, entitled “Why Fight? Causes and Consequences of Joining a Tyrant’s Army” analyzes the motivations and implications of members of marginalized groups joining the army in authoritarian regimes. Historically, authoritarian rulers have built armies that included citizens who had been victims of marginalization, persecution, and repression. The literature assumes that such individuals will either mobilize against the state or withdraw from political engagement altogether; in either one of these hypotheses, they will not devote themselves in fighting in an external war to defend the internal enemy. In contrast to the predictions of the literature, Talibova shows that there is instead a complex calculation that marginalized ethnic groups make: joining the army may improve their long-term survival by increasing their ability to change the system. Building on empirical evidence from Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union from the late 1890s through the 1950s, Talibova maps the trajectory of marginalized citizens from the time they are enlisted for an external war to the post-war period, where she tracks their mobilization against the authoritarian regime and the treatment of these veterans after a regime change. This mapping offers both theoretical and empirical contributions to the literature. Theoretically, in addition to articulating the reasons why marginalized groups may join the army of a repressive state, Talibova also shows that the citizen’s capacity to organize and maintain an armed struggle is an important factor in challenges to authoritarian regimes (insurrections, insurgencies, revolts). Empirically, Talibova’s dissertation engaged in careful and detailed archival work, which required innovative computational methods to transform individual level administrative records, some of them hand-written, into machine readable information to build databases that could be linked and compared. The committee was extremely impressed with the scope of the innovative data collection, the relevance and originality of the findings for the specialized literature, and Talibova’s theoretical insights.
The Oliver E. Williamson Best Conference Paper Award:
"From Connections to Persistence: Evidence from Political Purges in Post-WWII France" by Toke Aidt, Jean Lacroix, and Pierre-Guillaume Méon
This is also a paper about connections, though in this case it is the connections of the French parliamentarians who supported the Vichy regime in 1940 and who stood to be purged, or lustrated—banned from public service—after the War. Intuitively, and generically, we might expect individuals who have better connections to be better able to protect their position in the event of regime change, such as the reversion to democracy in post-war France. In practice, connections are hard to document, and their effects hard to identify.
The paper has a beautiful design that exploits a plausibly proxy for connections—background in the law, and the fact that some of those who were judging the former parliamentarians were themselves prominent members of the Parisian legal community—and an institutional design such that the decision to purge operated through a two-stage legal process—one in the relevant département, one in Paris—where only the second stage was controlled by those prominent Parisian lawyers.
The basic finding—and there is so much more—is that law graduates were substantially more likely to be acquitted by the Parisian court, which made the final decision and where they had connections, than in the district courts that made the initial recommendation.
One of the really great things about this paper is the careful attention to supporting evidence in the defendants' dossiers, collected through archival research, and to the meanings attached to those documents. Thus, for example, the paper exploits the tone of the letters from those who lobbied for acquittal: a letter than begins "Cher ami" means something different from one with a more generic salutation. The paper is a pleasure to read and to see presented at the conference. The committee is confident that it will have a large impact. Congratulations to the authors.