The 2004 Gaus Award Lecture by Patricia W. Ingraham, "'You Talking to Me?' Accountability and the Modern Public Service," was published in the January, 2005 issue of PS and can be accessed at http://www.apsanet.org/imgtest/2004talkingtome-Ingraham.pdf.

The 2005 Gaus Award winner is Vincent Ostrom, Arthur Bentley Professor of Political Science Emeritus and Co-Director of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University. The following is drawn from the letter nominating Professor Ostrom for the Gaus Award:

"In a lifetime of exemplary scholarship, Professor Ostrom has challenged and changed our understanding of American politics and administration involving metropolitan and municipal government, resource management, and educational policy, as well as federalism and constitutional analysis. In the 1950s he achieved intellectual breakthroughs in the study and practice of water resource management and educational administration; in the 1960s, he made us think differently about metropolitan organization and public administration, while being at the same time editor in chief of the leading journal in the profession, Public Administration Review; in the 1970s he offered novel interpretations of federalism and constitutional choice, serving also as co-founder and president of the Public Choice Society. The books and articles he wrote during this period - many translated in other languages - continue to be cited and used.

"Professor Ostrom continued to advance understanding and nourish the training of new generations of scholars by establishing, with Elinor Ostrom, the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University in 1973. In its more than twenty-five years of existence, the Workshop codirected by Vincent Ostrom has trained numerous students around the world in the study and practice of public administration and its relationship to constitutional choice as well as institutional analysis and development. In a career of 60 years, Vincent has challenged scholars at all stages in their careers, from undergraduates to full professors, to treat their written works as drafts on a longer and deeper path to understanding.

"Two core features in Vincent Ostrom's approach to the study and practice of politics and public administration gave both intellectual coherence and lasting value to his professional work between the 1950s and the 1970s. One core feature has to do with the constant concern to tie theory to the practice of public administration. The union of interests between political theory and policy analysis is, for example, the foundational and operational characteristic of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis. The other core feature has to do with the way Vincent Ostrom brought together theory and practice by seeking answers to the question: How can we create enduring communities in which people will be able to live as free participants in a self-governing order? This question was, for example, the basic paradigm problem in Ostrom's concern about the award-winning book The Political Theory of A Compound Republic: Designing the American Experiment (1971, 1987) and his subsequent The Intellectual Crisis in American Public Administration (1973, 1989).

"Gradually, Professor Ostrom realized that what he called the basis paradigm problem in American politics and public administration reached more deeply into the constitution of order in other societies as well. The late 1970s were for him the beginning of a comparative inquiry about self-governance and public administration that went well beyond the familiar confines of North America. This broadening of concern was helped by discussion with European scholars that started in Berlin in the mid-1970s and resulted by the mid-1980s in multinational, multidisciplinary research on problems in the public sector. But Ostrom's intellectual journey did not stop in Europe. It also took him to other continents and especially Africa and Asia - in effect, wherever people face the challenge of fashioning and refashioning public service delivery systems and other collective choices. His inspiration guided the creation of the volume he coedited, 'Rethinking Institutional Analysis and Development: Issues Alternatives and Choices' (1988); translated in several languages, the volume has spread the ideas fashioned by Vincent Ostrom about politics and administration, reaching a wide audience in the developing world.

"The awareness of issues of public administration world-wide led Professor Ostrom to a renewed appreciation of the larger message in the second volume of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America - the vulnerability of democracies. For Ostrom, as for Tocqueville, understanding the vulnerability of democracies is necessary to realizing democratic potentials. In this way the paradigm problem in American public affairs became for Vincent Ostrom a case of a larger struggle involving the constitution of order in other democratic societies and all other societies aspiring to be self governing democracies in the contemporary world.

"Coming after more than fifty years of teaching, his most recent book The Meaning of Democracy and the Vulnerability of Democracies (1997) explores the social and cultural context necessary for democratic systems to flourish. Social as well as human capitals are critical. The book discusses differences in the ideas about social organization among various cultural and intellectual traditions, considers the difficulties encountered over time in building democratic societies in America, Asia, Europe and Africa, and outlines lessons from these experiences for efforts to build and research the art of association. In brief, this book is as much a memoir of a lifetime of inquiry bearing witness to the place of fundamental beliefs as it is a theoretical inquiry about the extent to which it is possible, in Ostrom's view, to resolve Tocqueville's puzzle whether free societies are viable forms of civilization."